Max Kandhola is a second generation Indian immigrant living in the UK. He combines his practice as a photographer with his position as Head of Photography at Nottingham Trent University. His photographic work and essays have been widely exhibited and published. His approach is philosophical-photography used within a cultural discourse, critically observing and questioning the complexity and relationship of the human condition, death and dying, identity and memory and mapping ancestral narratives through history and heritage. He is on the board of Directors at Rhubarb Rhubarb, International Photography Festival, Birmingham UK, and for Pavilion, Leeds, UK. Max has worked with numerous agencies as a mentor and advisor to emerging and mid career artists for over 10 years.
In the mid-1990s Max Kandhola embarked upon a personal odyssey to map his family heritage. Illustration of Life, the first part of the trilogy that began in 1996, is a poignant and painful document of his father’s struggle with cancer that led to his death. In our unpredictable world there is one certainty upon which we can always rely; yet death, when it comes, is never easy. In this extraordinary body of work, Kandhola photographed his father in the final stages of a terminal illness. His intensely personal and honest images confront us with the intimate and often painful reality of death.Following his fathers diagnosis with cancer, Kandhola spent two years meticulously collecting and photographing fragments and debris from his chemotherapy treatment: samples of blood, urine, hair and ultimately even the ash from...