Inside the Indian Coffee House on The Mall, Shimla, the clink of cups and the low murmur of conversation carry across decades. High in the Himalayan foothills, the city clings to a ridge of cedar and stone, its narrow lanes winding past relics of the colonial era and the low hum of contemporary life. Once the summer capital of the British Raj and now Himachal Pradesh’s capital, Shimla still bears traces of empire and independence within its steep topography — cedar forests, colonial façades, and crowded bazaars balanced along winding slopes. In this workers’ cooperative, founded in the 1950s and still run by its employees, photographer Yask Desai has found a stillness that belongs to no single country.
On the cover of his new 32-page zine Shimla, published by the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Perimeter Editions (CCP.PE.Z.003), a solitary man sits beneath a menu board, his body turned slightly inward, the prices descending neatly in rupees and paise. Open the book and the café unfolds: two men sit to the left in quiet conversation, while on the right a waiter in a white cap bends to serve a woman mid-sentence. The sequence feels at once cinematic and timeless. Rendered in greys and shadows, the light carries the softness of memory — its patience more telling than its drama. Nothing monumental occurs — and that is precisely the point. Shimla is less about spectacle than about duration: the endurance of spaces, gestures, and lives that persist with quiet dignity amid the noise of modernity.
Durations and Gestures
Born in Australia to an Indian father and Australian mother, Desai has spent his life between two visual vocabularies. His photographs are neither nostalgic nor ethnographic; they are acts of return — patient, searching, humane. For him, photography is not a record but a way of thinking, a language capable of holding the complexities of migration, memory, and the post-colonial condition.
Desai’s remark carries the quiet cadence of someone who has watched the medium evolve alongside his own biography. He began photographing in the 1990s, inspired — as so many were — by Robert Frank’s The Americans. He first encountered the book in the American Center Library in New Delhi, its binding removed and encased in leather. “I pored over that book,” he recalls. “I made notes and began to try to replicate it in India post-liberalisation. It was, of course, overly ambitious, but it’s good to have these aims, especially when you’re young.” What began as imitation grew into inquiry. In Desai’s later works — Craigieburn (2018) and Telia (2021) — Frank’s wandering eye remains, but it is tempered by empathy and a sense of collaboration with his subjects.
Politics of Attention
Shimla continues this pursuit in miniature. It is not a grand photobook or gallery installation but a small, deliberate zine that feels closer to a letter or keepsake. The Indian Coffee House becomes a stage where time moves in slow circles. The café has hosted students, poets, politicians, and pensioners for generations. “For me,” Desai says, “the space deserves respect. It’s modest, yet it embraces a broader cross-section of the local community than many other places. That I get to see it in much the same form as it was fifty years ago is a privilege.”
In his photographs, that respect translates into restraint. The light is diffuse, unhurried. Figures lean across wooden tables, shadows gather softly in the corners. A corridor recedes into a back room where three men talk quietly. The grain of the image seems to carry the sound of low conversation.
“The zine is a humble format,” Desai says. “It was a modest project in subject and scope, but it was important for me personally — to convey a set of emotions and memories. Zines are made to be handed from one person to the next, to exist as a kind of democratic medium. That fits perfectly with the ethos of the Coffee House.”
Photography is not a record but a way of thinking — a language capable of holding the complexities of migration, memory, and the post-colonial condition.
What he’s describing is more than form; it’s a politics of attention. Desai photographs what endures rather than what changes. Meaning lies in the repetition of gestures — the way a waiter balances a tray, the tilt of a regular’s head in morning light, the handwritten promise of Nothing but Delicious Coffee for Me. These images, printed soft-grey on uncoated paper, become small monuments to civic life. They refuse exoticism. They resist nostalgia. They document the ordinary as an act of resistance — a space where community still happens without mediation or spectacle.
Relational Geographies
Desai’s earlier projects prepared the ground for this kind of seeing. In Telia, he reconstructed the stories of Indian hawkers who travelled through rural Australia a century ago, countering the erasures of colonial history. In Craigieburn, he turned the camera toward Melbourne’s outer suburbs, examining the social geographies of belonging. Both works explored how people inhabit and reshape place — how stories, not structures, define it. “Place,” he says, “is all about people. Without their stories and experiences, places are merely part of physical geography.” That philosophy anchors Shimla, where each photograph becomes a dialogue between memory and presence.
To understand Shimla within the trajectory of Desai’s practice is to see how his work moves between fieldwork and reflection, between the material of the archive and the living moment. His projects often begin with a journey, though not always a geographical one. Telia, for instance, traced the paths of those early Indian hawkers, piecing together fragments from local archives and colonial newspapers. “I wanted to do something that challenged the Anglo dominance that still exists within much of the culture industries of this country,” he explains. “For me, being of Indian origin, it just became the story that I could tell most authentically within the eyes of the art world.”
For Desai, authenticity is not a question of identity but of care — of giving time to a subject until it reveals its complexity. In Telia, that care took the form of research and collaboration, revealing unexpected kinships between Indian migrants and Aboriginal Australians, many of whom intermarried. The project reframed migration not as displacement but as connection — a conversation across cultures rather than a one-way story of loss.
That attention to relational space — between people, histories, and images — extends into Shimla, though the scale is smaller and more personal. The Indian Coffee House becomes a civic microcosm, a place where belonging is performed in the simplest gestures: a cup placed on a saucer, a glance exchanged across the room. His photographs mirror that democracy, giving equal weight to each table, each pause, each unseen narrative.
Listening as Method
There is an implicit politics in this quiet observation. In an art world conditioned by spectacle, Desai’s refusal to dramatise is its own form of resistance. His images are not about revelation but presence — what John Berger called “a record of looking at”. The uncoated paper of the zine, tactile and absorbent, deepens that humility. The modest production is not aesthetic restraint but conceptual statement: form and subject bound by the same ethic of care.
Ethics, for Desai, are inseparable from image-making. “Recently I’ve begun to think about ethics in photography,” he says. “Things are changing fast. I still see the West setting the agenda for the East, albeit in a subtler way than before. More importantly, I see a global middle and upper-middle class setting ethical and artistic parameters for everyone else. That is to be resisted.” His words are measured but firm — less complaint than quiet defiance.
Listening, for Desai, is both method and morality. “My research occurred largely as I took the images,” he explains. “I looked at old pictures of myself and of Shimla that my father had taken. It was easy to get into the zone of remembering things that happened all those years ago.” The boundary between research and feeling blurs; memory becomes a working tool. To photograph the Coffee House is to photograph both a place and its echo — the trace of a life passing again through its own landscape.
That temporal layering gives Shimla its resonance. Each photograph feels slightly haunted — not by absence but by endurance. A chair bears the weight of decades of conversation; a wall holds the shadow of countless hands. Desai’s camera does not freeze time; it thickens it. In one of the zine’s most affecting spreads, a narrow corridor leads to a back room where three men sit in quiet discussion. The light draws the eye forward, but the space resists closure — like a memory one can approach but never fully recover.
Endurance and Return
Language plays a secondary, contrapuntal role in Desai’s practice. He often writes alongside his images but remains wary of overstatement. “Often I think of words first,” he says, “but there can be a tendency to overdo words — the images can get lost.” In Shimla, the sequencing follows the rhythm of a visit: arrival, pause, observation, departure. “As the photographer,” he notes, “you can get sidetracked by chronology. Even if they are my images, I’m happy to leave that part to those who have done it multiple times.”
Viewed alongside Craigieburn and Telia, Shimla feels like a distillation — an inward turn after decades of outward journeys. In the suburban streets of Craigieburn, Desai photographed dislocation; in Shimla, he photographs return. Yet the emotional thread is the same: an ache for continuity in an accelerated world.
If Telia and Craigieburn showed the artist as a documentarian, Shimla reveals him as a witness — not to spectacle, but to survival. The Indian Coffee House stands as both civic monument and personal refuge, one of the last places where democracy still looks like conversation. To photograph such a space requires humility; to publish it as a zine, even more so.
Zines are made to be handed from one person to the next — to exist as a democratic medium. That fits perfectly with the ethos of the Coffee House.
There is something quietly profound in that understatement — the smallness of the book mirroring the smallness of its subject, both insisting on their own dignity. In an era when art often seeks visibility through provocation, Shimla offers another model: work that speaks softly yet endures. It is a portrait of continuity, made by an artist who understands that to look carefully is a form of care.
When asked what remains after years of photographing across continents and histories, Desai answers with characteristic modesty: “I feel like I’ve just begun. I’m still chasing everything — visually, ethically, personally. I don’t really know what my practice will look like in five years, and I’m fine with that.” It’s the response of someone who knows that understanding — of place, of history, of self — is an ongoing conversation, not a finished statement.
Perhaps that is what Shimla ultimately offers: a vision of photography as endurance, as patience, as quiet resistance to forgetting. Desai’s images do not seek revelation; they invite us instead to sit down, listen to the low hum of the room, and notice what persists.
The following interview traces Desai’s journey between two continents and his evolving sense of photographic ethics.
A photograph can have a completely different meaning over time. It may start its life as a seemingly inconsequential snapshot and evolve into an important monument to someone’s life. – Yask Desai
You’ve lived and worked between India and Australia for much of your life. When did photography begin to feel like a language that could hold both?
For a long time, I never really thought the photographs I took in India would be interesting to anyone beyond a few friends and family, but I always found it a wonderful place to make photographs. It’s always inspired me to think of potential ideas and bodies of work. In the last 30 years or so, photography has begun to re-orientate itself and, in many ways, has led the debate on post-colonialism within the arts. In that sense, I have been fortunate to be around at this time and to have been photographing fairly consistently over that period.
Was there an early image or encounter that made you realise photography could do more than record—that it could think, reflect, even question?
It’s quite clichéd, but The Americans by Robert Frank was the start of looking at photography as something more than just a tool of direct representation. I remember seeing the book for the first time in the American Center Library in New Delhi, removed from its original binding and encased in leather. I pored over that book, made notes, and began to try to replicate it in India post-economic liberalisation. It was, of course, overly ambitious, but it’s good to have those aims, especially when you’re young.
Your work often begins with a journey. Beyond geography, what does “place” mean to you as an artist?
Place is all about people—what has gone on there, personal stories, their social and political relationships, and their connection to a certain space. Without people’s stories, memories, and experiences, places are merely part of physical geography. If, for example, I see a vacant block of land in a big city, I want to know why it hasn’t been built upon—how has it avoided the economic imperative of constructing something on it? Place has to be about people, but after a while, you can also understand place by understanding the wider world and, more importantly, the immediate environment you’re photographing in. That understanding will, of course, be subjective.
Let’s talk about Shimla. What drew you back to the Indian Coffee House, and what did you hope to preserve or reveal through it?
Shimla is a special place for my family. Perhaps it was the only place my mum liked in India, and as a kid that made me like it too. The Coffee House was somewhere we visited regularly as part of our routine. We stayed in a huge former British palace and sometimes were virtually the only people there apart from the staff. I was an only child, so I became adept at amusing myself, but the Coffee House was an adventure—three or four kilometres away on foot, something to look forward to. It’s a long time ago, but I still remember that feeling. It’s really that sense of going somewhere that was always welcoming and substantial that I wanted to portray.
To photograph the Coffee House is to photograph both a place and its echo — the trace of a life passing again through its own landscape.
The work in Shimla feels both intimate and civic. How did you arrive at that particular tone of quiet observation?
For me, the space deserves respect. The Coffee House has a long socio-political history. It is modest, yet it embraces a broader cross-section of the local community than many other places. That I get to see it and patronise it in much the same form as it was 50 years ago is a privilege for me. I wanted that to come out within the images—there was no need to overplay anything. Just sit and take it in.
Why did that project need to exist as a small zine? What does the handheld form allow that other formats can’t?
The zine is a humble format, and this was a modest project in terms of its subject matter and scope. It was important for me personally in trying to convey a set of emotions and memories. Zines are made to be handed from one person to the next and to exist as a kind of democratic medium. All of that fits perfectly with the ethos of the Coffee House.
The sequencing in your books feels very deliberate. When you were placing the images in Shimla, what rhythm or feeling were you trying to create?
I left the sequencing to the designers. I think with things like that, they’re so well versed at looking at work from the perspective of viewers that they can do a far better job of it than me. As the photographer—and therefore the person who was there when the images were made—one can sometimes get sidetracked by things like chronology that have nothing to do with making the most effective choices when sequencing. Even if they’re my images, I’m very happy to leave that part in the hands of those who have done it multiple times for the audiences they serve.
Research sits at the centre of your process. What does it actually look like when you’re deep in it—reading, collecting, listening, wandering?
My research occurred largely as I took the images. I looked at old pictures of myself and the surrounds in Shimla that my father had taken. It was easy to get into the zone of remembering things that happened all those years ago. Then, from the years of street photography, studying photography more recently, and looking at countless photobooks, the style just comes to me in the viewfinder. I know when I’ve taken a good picture—or at least one that will fit with what I’m trying to do.
When you work with archival photographs or family documents, how do you decide what can be re-used and what should remain untouched?
There are things I would never use from the archive, whether personal or someone else’s. You have to become a kind of editor. For example, if I’m talking about the systematic racism faced by Indians in the early days of European colonisation of Australia, I’m not going to highlight petty crimes an Indian may have engaged in—unless, of course, there’s a direct point to it. With regard to my own family and their archive, again I would essentially try to remain generous and positive. It doesn’t mean every single story has to be a happy one, but overall, if I engage with an archive, that engagement should contribute to a greater collective understanding as a result of me having worked with it.
You often write alongside images. Do words emerge before the pictures, or afterward as a way of finding their meaning?
It depends, really, but often I think of words first. Then again, there have been many times when I’ve photographed and, as you say, words help to contextualise the images and make them more cohesive afterwards. There can be a tendency to overdo words at times, and the images can get lost. One has to be mindful of that. If one is working within the realm of conceptual photography, some sort of contextualising through words is important—maybe even essential.
In Telia, you reconstructed the stories of Indian hawkers in Australia a century ago. What first drew you to those men and their journeys?
I wanted to do something that challenged the Anglo dominance that still exists within much of the culture industries of this country. For me, being of Indian origin, it just became the story I could tell most authentically within the eyes of the art world. I think anyone can tell the story, but the question is whether they’ll care enough to do it. What matters in the end is the politics of the artist rather than their ethnicity, but still, I am Indian-Australian, so it was something I could engage with without it seeming like I was telling someone else’s story.
How did that project reshape your understanding of your own heritage and the broader idea of diaspora?
I don’t think it reshaped my understanding of my own heritage, but it did make me think in greater detail about the colonial project within Australia and about which people came here and why. The process of globalisation was in full swing even 175 years ago, so researching the migration journeys of a particular community makes you understand more deeply the forces that act upon people and compel them to move. Indians in general had a different relationship with Aboriginal Australia to that of European settlers. In fact, many Indians married into the Aboriginal community, and to me that was the most interesting thing I engaged with when working on Telia.
Looking back, what threads connect Craigieburn to Telia and Shimla?
I guess the common thread is that I need to collaborate with my subjects to make these projects happen. The level of engagement within each project was different, but essentially they’re all people-focused works. I like that because I’m essentially a shy person, and I’ve always enjoyed challenging myself through photography and the way it almost forces me to engage with people who are, at first, strangers. It’s very human. Even if someone says no, I don’t mind—it’s part of the process I really enjoy.
What does returning—to places, to histories, to half-forgotten images—reveal for you that novelty cannot?
The thing I’ve realised is that a photograph can have a completely different meaning over time. It may start its life as a seemingly inconsequential snapshot and evolve into an important monument to someone’s life. To look at old photographs—whether taken by you or a stranger—is a great pleasure. There are endless readings possible depending on where you are in life. One of the first photobooks I bought was by the American Ansel Adams. It was expensive at the time, and I eyed it for months in a shop in South Delhi. It was part ‘how-to’ and part celebration of his work. I went through so many stages with that book—from thinking there was nothing better, to seeing it as little more than an apolitical book on photographic technique, to then considering whether Ansel Adams was a legitimate environmentalist—perhaps all within a year or two. Now that book means something else to me. It’s like a starting point; it reminds me how hard I’ve made myself work when it comes to this medium and to thinking in general.
You’ve shown work at Blak Dot Gallery, the Museum of Australian Photography, and through small-press publishing. How does scale or context alter the way people read your images?
Once your work is institutionalised, in whatever modest way, people look at it differently. You become part of a small club. You may not be given ongoing membership, but while you’re there people suddenly begin to take what you make seriously. It’s very surprising at first, but I realise I cannot control this. I may be forgotten, ignored, or become dull, but I can’t decide what others should think or how they should react. All I can do is keep working, keep photographing, keep reading, keep drawing inspiration from what others make, and never give up. The more your work is shown, the more gravitas it accumulates collectively; however, that’s not my aim. To leave behind something of substance is all I work towards. In that sense, gallery or print—big or small—doesn’t matter. I just want to leave behind something substantial, something that documents my journey and my time in the world. My dad told me, “If you have the privilege of education and of being one of the few in the middle class, you should leave the world a slightly better place for you having lived in it.” I believe in that.
Your work has received recognition in awards such as the National Photographic Portrait Prize and the Australia & New Zealand Photobook Awards. Do moments like these alter your relationship to the work, or do they simply trace its path as it moves through the world?
Obviously you feel happy when your work is recognised in whatever small way, but again I don’t kid myself that there aren’t thousands of other artists equally deserving of such recognition who don’t receive it. I made a pact with myself early on to never compete against my colleagues—to never feel bitter or let down if I don’t receive recognition and others do. I don’t compare my work to anyone else. I just try to learn from everyone without expecting anything in return. Once you do that, you free yourself to make whatever it is you want to make. It’s sad, in a way, that the world almost compels artists to compete against one another when we should be each other’s greatest support. It’s not the fault of individuals; it’s very logical given the state of the arts within a system ruled by market forces. Finally, there are a few people who have consistently helped and supported me—some friends or family, some professional relationships, some both. The support these people have given me is invaluable. We all need a level of validation somewhere to keep us going, or at least to keep us going with a healthy level of optimism intact.
After working through these layered histories, what questions are you still chasing—visually, ethically, personally?
I feel like I’ve just begun. I’m still chasing everything along those three fronts, and I always want to feel like that. I don’t really know what my practice will look like in five years—or even two—and I’m fine with that. I’m just trying to stay fit and healthy so I can keep working. This year, while working, I walked so much my knees began to feel a hundred years old. I know those physical challenges may only become greater, but when the time comes, I’m sure I can adjust. Recently I’ve begun to think about ethics in photography. Things are changing fast. I still see the West setting the agenda for the East, albeit in a much subtler way than before; however, more importantly, what I see is a global middle and upper-middle class setting ethical and artistic parameters for everyone else. A curator in India, for example, may have far more in common with a curator in the UK than with someone from a regional town in India who makes images. That is to be resisted.
To spend time with Yask Desai’s work is to be reminded that attention itself can be a radical act.
If you could photograph one place that no longer exists, what would it be, and why?
I wish I’d started earlier, that’s all. I began photographing seriously at 26, but I often think what I could’ve done if I’d had my camera with me consistently through my teen years or early family trips to India, or through my life growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in Australia. That aside, I would love to photograph India post-independence as it began its journey as a non-aligned country in Asia. I remember India in the ’70s—it was so different to where I was born in Australia. The world is much more homogenised now. The cultural bomb was dropped long ago; it has obliterated so much of what was unique.
To spend time with Yask Desai’s work is to be reminded that attention itself can be a radical act. His photographs neither shout nor declare; they linger. In a world where images arrive faster than thought, Desai’s practice restores the rhythm of looking — slow, reflective, human. The Indian Coffee House, with its worn chairs and mirrored walls, is not a relic of the past but a rehearsal for the future: a space where community survives through care. If there is a politics in Desai’s vision, it is the politics of empathy — the belief that the everyday, when seen closely enough, contains everything we need to remember who we are.
- Shimla is published by Perimeter Editions in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Photography and is available directly from Perimeter Editions.
