Photographer and writer Buku Sarkar documents seven years of living with an undiagnosed neurological disorder through a self-portrait series made in private, in the apartment she rarely left, that refuses to give the viewer complete access to what it shows.
In the summer of 2018, after years of tremors, blackouts, extreme exhaustion and a diagnosis that no one could give her, Buku Sarkar reached a turning point. She had been hiding the reality of her condition from almost everyone around her. That summer she decided to stop.
“If I was going to have to live with this condition, the only way I could was to chronicle it. And publicly. No more hiding. No more charades.”
Containment Diaries is the series that followed: self-portraits made in Calcutta over seven years, documenting life with a neurological condition whose symptoms overlap with both MS and Parkinson’s, though it is neither. The images are chronological, mapping the cycles of fear and hope, exhaustion and brief recovery, that have defined Sarkar’s daily experience since her first symptoms began in New Delhi in 2013. They show her as she was when no one else saw her, alone in her apartment, surrounded by a garden she rarely entered.
The images are, as she intends, uncomfortable. They do not offer reassurance or resolution. They record what chronic illness actually looks like when the performance of wellness is abandoned: the body that cannot be relied upon, the loss of confidence that follows the loss of physical certainty, the way identity itself becomes unstable when the body that grounds it fails. “When you lose your body, you become a ghost to yourself,” she writes. The self-portraits hold that experience without softening it.
There is also, within the series, a deliberate withholding. In several images, Sarkar blurs or fractures her own face.
“When I blur her face in the second and third images, when I let the slow fracture her into layers, I am refusing to give the viewer complete access to her,” she writes. “I am saying: you can look, but you cannot possess. You can see her beauty, but you cannot know her. She will remain, in some essential way, unavailable to your gaze.”
The project documents and resists at the same time, which is its particular power.
The series sits alongside a broader practice of remarkable reach. Sarkar’s photobook Photowali Didi (Fall Line Press, 2023) documents five years with residents of a Calcutta slum. Her poetry collection My Dead Flowers is forthcoming from Harper Collins India. Her screenplay The Shameless was adapted into a feature film that premiered at Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard in 2024. Containment Diaries is currently developing into a memoir.
Buku Sarkar is a photographer and writer working between Calcutta, New York and Paris. Her work has been exhibited at Art Basel Miami and the ICP, and featured in the New York Review of Books and New York Times. She is GUP Magazine x Hungry Eye Gallery’s Fresh Eyes Talent 2026 and serves as part-time faculty at the International Center of Photography.
ARTIST LINKS
bukusarkar.com
@bukuagain
Containment Diaries, 2018 to present. Self-portraits, Calcutta, India.
