Naveen Naqvi was born in Karachi, Pakistan and grew up in the small oil refinery town of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia. She is now based in Vancouver. Her first experience of photography from shoot to dark room was at age 14 with black and white film and a Yashica camera. Since then, her photographic work has been published in print and online. Naqvi has worked in broadcast journalism as Producer Pakistan for NBC News and as a senior anchor and reporter at DawnNews, as well as having written for various national and international publications.
There There is a personal photographic series documenting belonging, love and loss over continents.
“This work moves back and forth between my two ‘homes’: my birthplace, Karachi, and the city of my residence, Vancouver. All images are shot in 120mm and 35mm over 2015-6.
Photographing in Vancouver is part of my day-to-day as I try to find a sense of belonging here. I think often of how the word ‘belonging’ holds within it ‘longing’.
I made the Karachi pictures on my last visit there; it was a family emergency that took me there, as my mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. It was an intense period of distress and insomnia but also, love. Between hospital visits and time with family, in an attempt to find control, I photographed. The title of the series: There, There expresses spatial and temporal distance, speaks of dreamscapes, and also does its work as a phrase that offers consolation.
Like many people in today’s world I have experienced at different stages of my life, movement from one place to the other. With it has come the loss of relationships, objects, spaces and indeed, lives as each move has resulted in the end of one life and the beginning of another. This is the core of all my photographic work.”
See more of Naveen's work on her website or Instagram.
