Some photographers document the world. Vikram Kushwah builds a different one and photographs that.
A photographer of dreams
Indian-born and London-trained, Kushwah works at the lush border between fashion and fine art, where the clothes matter less than the story they are wearing. His images are unmistakable: misty forests and faded interiors, girls in vintage dress, books that float and balloons that drift, scenes lit with the soft, golden unreality of a memory you are not sure you actually have. They are staged with painterly care, every frame composed like an illustration from a storybook whose text has gone missing.
Reliving childhood memories
The series that gives this piece its name leans directly into that nostalgia. Kushwah treats childhood not as a subject to be documented but as a mood to be reconstructed — the half-light, the make-believe, the slight unease that runs under every fairy tale. There is a Freudian uncanniness to the work: the familiar (a girl, a book, a forest) tilted just far enough into strangeness that it stops feeling safe. His debt is to literature and to the Pre-Raphaelite and Surrealist image as much as to fashion; the result reads like Lewis Carroll restaged by a couture house.
Craft behind the reverie
What keeps the work from tipping into whimsy is the rigour underneath. The dreaminess is engineered — through location, set-dressing, casting and a controlled, painterly palette — not stumbled upon. Kushwah belongs to a lineage of narrative photographers for whom the camera is a storytelling instrument first, and the production design carries as much of the meaning as the face in the frame.
Reading it again in 2026
In an image culture now fluent in artificial dreamscapes generated in seconds, Kushwah's hand-built reveries feel pointedly different: every uncanny forest was actually found and lit, every floating object actually placed. The labour is the soul of it. His work sits naturally beside the other image-makers in our archive who stage rather than snatch the world — the cinematic tableaux of Alex Prager and the dissolving figures of Olivier Valsecchi — and within the longer story of two centuries of the camera. A dream you can keep, because someone built it by hand.