THIS IS NOT AN ARTIST STATEMENT

I confess I've been an accomplice to men and women yearning to emerge from the shadows. I attempted to render their dreams of self in adulatory portraits; articulated in a filigree of shadow and light their untold stories, their lost loves, their bruised hopes, their demolished kingdoms, and secret desires. I held their trust as sacred. I tried to distill the truth from their fictions. I concede it’s all a trick of the light anyway.

It’s true that a decade of New York City trains ran through me. In their banshee wailing I took shelter, comforted by the transient company of the derelict and the divine. It can now be revealed that I interrogated hundreds of trees in the hope of getting their side of the story as Earth is surely dying. Some wept gracefully like Japanese widows in the Namibian Savannah, and others whispered unspeakable truths about the destruction brought upon us by avaricious men. It is a fact I’ve been escorted out of cemeteries from the Galapagos to Greece, imagining past lives and future heartbreak well after closing time, in trouble with the lonesome caretakers of the long gone. 

These images are wounded light smeared across skin and marble and sky in unknown cities animated by outlaws and vagabond queens, and the phantoms of their youth. I’ve dialogued with protagonists aching to be seen, to be held in a vision, to be consoled by an artistic gesture of tenderness. Some pictures are confessions; others are investigations of remnant beauty and enchantment in a world gone terribly wrong. Sweat and fingerprints smudged a few as I circled the actor, the dancer, the Lakota Sioux and they circled me, and in one, a rogue streak of light blew up the heroine’s eye. You spend years waiting for the muse, and sometimes she rides in on a red horse, and emotions flow like forgotten rivers returning to the desert in the glow of a reckless moon. My images are a homage to the gorgeous unknown, using crude Holgas, shiny new Leicas, bulky Canons, Sonys, Nikons, iPhones, spit, pixels, and glue. Often, unforgettable faces shimmered into view in faltering light on expired film, on memory cards corrupted by beauty. 

Forever, I was trailing Araki and Moriyama in Shinjuku and Harajuku in the wet charcoal side streets where kimonoed women in bondage and three-legged dogs floated in the neon sky. Forever, I was tattooed by Bob Dylan, haunted by Tom Waits, and left on Shyam Benegal’s cutting table in degrading film stock. I've always wanted to be alone in a room with Smita Patil with my supermarket Minolta, posing her next to a window as the sun collapsed outside in a clementine hush. I only ever dreamed of her in grainy black and white, 1600 or even 3200.

The truth is: this is not my work. It is a lookbook of an invisible royalty, a catalog of desires and alternative endings. My photography is not an artistic practice. It is a sequence of hallucinations with bruised and beautiful dissenters in lost cities at the edge of time seen through an unreliable but adoring eye. One could argue they are journal entries about encounters with punks and poets and narcoleptic lovers and losers in my travels through our bewildering world. These are not photographs. They are electrified histories of my co-conspirators, pulsating with the smell of Oud, the songs of Asmahan, and the subway thrumming below us. You can dismiss them as anti-portraits streaked with laughter and tears as the shutter opened and closed one last time and I took the midnight bus home.

But at least we have forensic evidence that once I was alive with my unlikely heroes in the intimacy of a disappearing moment, rendering them immortal in our imagination.

THIS IS NOT AN ARTIST BIO

The founder of MTV World, writer, filmmaker and photographer based in New York, Nusrat Durrani moves like a creative phantom through disciplines, industries, cities, and media. As an MTV executive, he has received numerous accolades, including being honored by President Obama for his films about Native American youth. Nusrat’s vast repertoire of visual storytelling includes the critically-acclaimed Rebel Music series and is infused with a desire to give voice to the voiceless and bring the beauty, color and diversity of global pop culture to the West. 

Nusrat’s films include Madly, the award-winning omnibus of unusual love stories from around the world, directed by Anurag Kashyap, Mia Wasikowska, Sion Sono, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Sebastian Silva; and An American Prayer, a blistering, poetic feature documentary about the U.S. during the Trump Presidency, pandemic, racial uprising, and the loss of his mother. Both are available on leading streaming platforms. 

Throughout his two-decade career at MTV in New York, Nusrat Durrani traveled across the U.S. heartland, North America, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and his beloved India, connecting with people and places that typically elude the gaze of professional photography: from the cowgirls of Montana to soulful divas in Morocco, punks in Istanbul and Shia mourners in Lucknow. Nusrat’s images tell emotionally charged stories that ache and pulsate with joy, hope and sorrow. His portraits feature obsessed lovers and beautiful losers alongside proud tribals and Native Americans while a decade of Iphone photography in the New York City subway is animated by the fervent, the glamorous, and the damned in the transitory intimacy of the daily commute. 

Nusrat has also obsessively photographed cemeteries, trees and animals, from the Galapagos Islands to Turkey, Namibia and South Africa. In the USA, he also has interviewed and created images with transgender youth across multiple ethnicities. 

Nusrat is working on a new film and multiple book projects, including a collection of short fiction, a novel, and several books of photography.

His upcoming photography exhibitions include “The Gorgeous Unknown,” a summation of three decades of unseen work and a scintillating multimedia homage to the wild diversity of humans that wander the earth.