Bharat Patel is a documentary photographer of people and places. He is based in Oxford, UK but also spends time in his native India. His early upbringing in Uganda and later in England for higher education and many years spent working in Brazil has given him experience of life in four different continents with vastly different cultures. His work tends to bounce between two sides: that between the views of the privileged colonisers and those of the colonised.

Graduating as Electronic Engineer, it was photography that would shape his world view – that together with his inclination to connect everything has most influence on his photography. Growing up during the 60s and 70s and traveling in later life, he often became a witness to traditions and ways of family life that were disappearing before his very eyes. These early encounters amidst a fast-changing world became crucial in inspiring the photographic journeys he would make later.

From his very early forays into photography, inspired by the likes of Sebastião Salgado, Steve McCurry, Lewis Hine and many others who has influenced him, Bharat was always fascinated by the people and communities he met in his various projects. He sought to capture and preserve the essence of what makes each of them unmistakably unique. In their everyday pursuits, he saw epic narratives. In a constantly changing world he tries to stop time by recording the moment in history of the people and to hopefully inform the future. He mixes his images as black and white and or as colour depending on the content and the message.
With no strict deadlines, he gives his unwavering attention to people and the spaces around them, often spending several years on each project.

Over the years, his body of work has come to reflect a few inherently recognisable style that have become the trademark of Bharat’s repertoire. His critically acclaimed work and a book on the Nomadic communities of India - “Nomadic Odyssey” featured perhaps for the first time ever the stories of the long forgotten nomadic tribes of India. Besides the omnipresent portraits, if one delves deeper into his work there surfaces an intense obsession with seeking out and preserving ways of life on the brink of extinction – and an affinity for people and cultures teetering on the margins of society. Nomadic Odyssey is a captivating journey into the nomadic tribes of India which is rich with images and stories that go back to a set of values of an earlier age. In his images and stories, he manages to capture an inexplicable part of this life even as it dissipates and disappears from society.

Some of his work is available as books, but many more images remain archived to be sorted and published. For him, a photograph is only complete and final when it is printed. Yearly exhibitions of his work are mostly where he showcases these prints. Over the years many of his projects have also been published in journals and magazines.

What also fascinates the viewer is that Bharat’s images – despite his proximity with the marginalised, often reveal shades of the nostalgic aesthetic, the fantastic and even the bizarre that lie hidden beneath.