Gomma Photography Grant 2025
Underwood
Photographer
Barkat Mehra
Underwood
13 Feb, 2026
Underwood is a meditation on familial bonds, admiration, and awakening. Set within a century-old house in southeast England, the project unfolds as a dialogue between Barkat’s family and the layered history of the home and its former inhabitants.As the child of Indian immigrants, Barkat experiences the house through a dual inheritance, where British conventions and Indian traditions coexist in quiet tension. The loss of her older brother marked a profound rupture, drawing the family inward and prompting a search for renewed meaning within the walls of their shared space. Suspended between cultures, they inhabit a kind of in-between — a place where creation becomes an act of preservation.The photographs move through power, grief, fragility, and above all, love. They reveal how memory lingers in rooms, in gestures, in light filtering through windows or resting on carpets and garden paths. Past and present converge, shaping a visual language that is both intimate and enduring.Through these images, Barkat and her parents negotiate healing, remembrance, and belonging. Underwood gently reconsiders parent–child dynamics and cross-cultural identity, offering a reflection on the invisible threads that bind family, history, and home.
About the photographer
Barkat Mehra
Barkat Mehra is a photographer born in the United Kingdom to Indian parents. Her work inhabits the space between memory and geography, absence and return. By tracing what persists between people and places, she captures the quiet intervals of family life.Through image‑making, Barkat explores the layered language of belonging—how inheritance, loss, and tenderness shape our sense of home. She earned a dual degree in Economics and Fine Art from Tufts University, and began using photography as a bridge between distances: between childhood and adulthood, India and the UK, intimacy and estrangement. Her photographs become containers of feeling, where gestures and spaces hold what remains unsaid.Deceitful Norms turns inward, examining the subtle negotiations of gender and identity within the family sphere. In this series, Barkat asks her parents to exchange clothing, dissolving inherited expectations and reimagining the boundaries of self.Her forthcoming photobook, Underwood, continues the conversation, offering an introspective meditation on grief, love, and the invisible threads that bind generations. Barkat’s images dwell in the emotional architectures we inherit, providing a visual testament to endurance, transformation, and the fragile beauty of belonging.
