Khichdi (Kitchari)

Khichdi (Kitchari) is Nick Sethi's first major artist book, a decade-long project photographing India as both an outsider and a native son, and it announced him as one of the more idiosyncratic voices in contemporary documentary photography.

Named for the rice-and-lentil dish eaten across India regardless of region or household, the book gathers portraits, still lifes and street pictures made over ten years of travel through the country. Sethi, an American-born photographer of Indian heritage who did not visit India until age seventeen, used the camera to build connection with people and place; his images stay conscious of photography as a shared experience, folding his own presence and interests into scenes built around gender, technology, and the pull between inherited tradition and encroaching Western culture. The sequencing resists a single fixed viewpoint, echoing the dish's own lack of one official recipe.

Published by Dashwood Books and printed in New Delhi under Sethi's own direction, the book established his reputation beyond editorial work for magazines including Vice, and positioned him within a generation of photographers using personal, first-hand access to complicate inherited outsider images of South Asia.