In 2008, I shifted from full-time photojournalism to explore the stories hidden in fleeting, often overlooked moments—narratives that unfold between the frames. This search led me to document scenes from multiple angles, revealing unexpected details and relationships. It moved me away from conventional production methods and towards a visual language that blends storytelling, documentation, and painterly intuition.

Over time, I began merging successive shots into diptychs, triptychs, and extended compositions. A turning point came during the 2004 Tsunami assignment in Nagapattinam and Thanjavur, when I instinctively panned across a scene of three men in a village. Only later, in the darkroom, did I realise this spontaneous gesture held the seed of my montage practice. From that moment grew my early panoramic works such as Puffs & Politics and Still, Edge of Fear.

Space has always fascinated me. Instead of confining a moment to a single frame, I pan and scan, capturing small shifts in movement and interaction. Years in news magazines taught me patience—the art of waiting, observing, and allowing time to unfold. This slow, immersive method now shapes the rhythm of my montages, where close-ups and wide frames interweave like fragments of memory.

During the 2020 lockdown, after leaving the newsroom, I revisited decades of archives—negatives, transparencies, CDs, digital files—and uncovered nearly forty unfinished projects. The montage work, however, felt alive. Within weeks, I created over a hundred new pieces and collaborated with Prof. Joly Puthussery to present Unleashing Panoramas, a two-part online exhibition that reached a global audience. Earlier selections were exhibited at the Birla Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, curated by Johny ML.

This book emerges from that long journey. What began as a response to the limits of a single frame has grown into a deliberate practice that expands the spatial and emotional possibilities of photographic storytelling. Each montage is not a frozen moment, but an unfolding experience where time, movement, and memory coexist.

These images invite viewers to slow down, to wander within the frame, and to discover how fragments speak to one another. The narratives they form are fluid, open-ended, and always evolving. This book is not just a collection of photographs—it is a meditation on seeing, and an attempt to reconstruct the world through layered moments of space and time.