Sameer Mohan (Sam) has spent more than two and a half decades working with photography and film across advertising, editorial, real estate and documentary projects. His commercial practice taught him how images shape desire, construct narratives and influence how we see the world, providing the technical discipline and visual vocabulary that continue to inform his work today.

Over time, his interest shifted towards what lies beyond the brief: the assumptions behind an image, the realities it leaves out, and the systems that shape how people and places are represented. His work in social-development contexts, particularly in remote parts of Africa, brought these questions into sharper focus.

The pandemic in 2020 marked a turning point. He stepped away from commercial assignments and moved to Ladakh, where he built a traditional mud house beside the Indus. Living away from urban life allowed him to reconsider his relationship with photography. After a period of putting the camera aside, he returned to image-making with a different purpose—not simply to make compelling images, but to understand why they need to exist.

Today, his practice is rooted in contemporary art. Working primarily in the Himalayas and South India, he develops long-form photographic projects exploring ecological precarity, cultural memory and the ethics of looking. Through landscapes, objects and constructed spaces, he examines the tensions between nature and development, belief and reality, presence and absence, and their implications for memory, territory, identity and power. He is a RICOH GR ambassador and co-founder of the FIVE60 collective, Bangalore.

His commercial years remain integral to his practice, but the purpose has changed. Rather than beginning with what an image needs to communicate to someone else, he begins with a question he needs to pursue himself.