In I Watched My Mother Cry, Indian visual artist and writer Imdad Barbhuyan constructs an intimate and poetic meditation on the grief shared between mothers and the Earth. Through personal photographs of his mother and landscapes of Assam, where he was born in 1993, Barbhuyan reveals how personal memory and ecological consciousness are deeply intertwined.

I Watched My Mother Cry and the Photography of Imdad Barbhuyan

The series reflects on the body as both landscape and archive — a vessel of care, loss, and resilience. Raised in close contact with nature and with a multidisciplinary artistic practice that includes photography, sculpture, writing, and performance, Barbhuyan’s work often weaves together themes such as femininity, belonging, and environmental fragility. In this project, maternal grief becomes both burden and bridge — an emotional terrain that mirrors the cycles of destruction and renewal of the planet.

The images move fluidly between the corporeal and the natural: skin, earth, and memory merge. Barbhuyan invites us to recognize care, nourishment, and impermanence not only in his mother’s tears but also in the rivers, monsoons, and wounds of the Earth.

This work continues the artist’s broader intention: to use personal storytelling to rethink our relationship with the climate crisis, where healing begins by seeing ourselves in the planet — and the planet in those we love most.