Labac Tea Garden Cachar, Assam, India (from the series Bachpan)
Archival pigment print
16 x 24 in
Vicky Roy’s humble beginnings took him through the rehabilitation programme at New Delhi’s Salaam Baalak Trust, an NGO that strives towards the support, protection and empowerment of street children. Given the instability and precarity of his own childhood, Roy admits to a life-long fascination with the enthusiasm, courage and resilience children often display in the face of adversity while seeking examples of such stories of redemption as he travels across urban and rural places around the country, in an effort to reconcile with the lacking idealism of his own early experiences.
For Roy, the wonderland of childhood is preserved more by a culture of curiosity than elaborate access to resources. In the series Bachpan – photographed in Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Maharashtra and West Bengal – Roy explores the psychology and cultural codes of childhood games by observing underprivileged children at play, making note of their limited access to toys and equipment as they rely instead on themselves as a community and their inventiveness with ideas and found material. In Janwaar Castle – shot in Madhya Pradesh – he documents a volunteer initiative undertaken to build a skate park for local school-going children in Janwaar, discovering a progressive transformation in the cultural fabric of the greater village through the immersion, passion and determination its youth expresses towards the sport of skateboarding with which they evolve their self-development.