Harshil Chauhan

Harshil Chauhan is an Indian-born, London-based visual artist working primarily with photography. His practice is rooted in observation, stillness, and emotional restraint, exploring the relationship between environment, human presence, and time. Beginning his photographic journey at the age of fifteen, Chauhan has developed a contemplative visual language that moves away from documentation toward ambiguity and open-ended interpretation.
His work often engages with landscapes, architectural forms, and the human body as sites where presence and absence quietly coexist. Influenced by cinematic rhythm and literary sensibility, Chauhan works slowly, allowing light, space, and repetition to guide the image-making process. Rather than constructing overt narratives, his images invite viewers to dwell within moments that feel suspended, encouraging reflection and emotional resonance.
Chauhan’s practice has been shaped through formal training in photography and filmmaking, as well as sustained independent research and lived experience. He has exhibited his work internationally across India, the United Kingdom, Moscow, Germany, and Australia. Currently based in London, he continues to develop new bodies of work that examine memory, temporality, and the subtle negotiations between body, space, and environment.


My practice explores moments of transition, between movement and stillness, presence and absence, body and environment. Working primarily with photography, I am drawn to thresholds where something is about to occur or has just passed, allowing uncertainty and quiet tension to shape the image.
I treat landscape, architecture, and the human body as interconnected subjects rather than separate categories. Spaces often carry more narrative weight than the figures that occupy them, while the body, when present, appears restrained, resting, or partially withdrawn. Scale, distance, and light are used deliberately to slow the act of looking and to emphasise fragility over dominance.
Rather than documenting events, my work focuses on traces and residual gestures. Paths worn by repetition, objects arranged for absent bodies, structures that reach upward while remaining vulnerable to time. These elements suggest memory as something embedded within space rather than held by individuals.
I resist resolution and spectacle, favouring images that remain open-ended and contemplative. The photographs function as quiet propositions, inviting viewers to inhabit moments that feel suspended rather than complete. Through this approach, I question ideas of permanence, belonging, and endurance, proposing photography as a medium capable of holding impermanence without attempting to resolve it.