Akshay Mahajan
Pune, Maharashtra, India
Akshay Mahajan is an photographic practitioner based in India. He restricts his practice to his immediate experience.
His work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde Diplomatique, Bloomberg BusinessWeek & the Paris Review among others.
He is also the co-publisher of blindboys.org, a community-driven space which uses simple and effective ways to reach out to photographers and audiences alike. Blindboys is committed to exploring effective ways to bring these two together link.
- Architecture
- Arts
- Editorial
- Environment
- Interior
- Landscape
- Portrait
- Reporting
Portrait of a Cadet
Akshay Mahajan
This series on the National Defence Academy in India joint Services academy of the Indian Armed Forces, where cadets of the three services, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force train together before they go on to pre-commissioning training in their respective service academies. It is the first tri-service academy in the world.
In 2013, I travelled to NDA to realize the portraits of cadets from one of the most important military academies in the post-colonial world. Interested since for a long time in the quest of looking at the so-called “Indian” Military identity — I met these young officers cadets who are a symbol of the link that exists between their school’s traditions and their history, and the future these cadets hold for the subcontinent’s military system. I have chosen to shoot portraits to create a topographic overlay of the academy beyond any nationalistic identity.