MEHNAZ NOOR
He is all of 20. Krutik Bharat Thakur is the quintessential small-town boy, who always dreamt of being an architect, but is now serenading people with his spectacular skills in photography. Thakur hails from Dahanu, to the north of Mumbai, and belongs to a hard-working middle-class family. Specialising in sunset silhouette photography, Thakur believes his love for nature guides his passion in photography.
Life had different plans for Thakur. Sunsets always attracted him and this led him to creating wonderful visual stories in silhouette. The most rewarding part of being a photographer, Thakur says, is that “You get to open up with the world. You connect with more people and see the world through different perspectives.”
When asked about how he struck upon the idea of using the sunset to tell stories, Thakur says, “I was inspired by a few foreign photographers and would always wonder how they did it. When I got a chance to use a DSLR after shuffling camera settings, I got some idea about how to click such photographs and kept learning and experimenting… I then began focussing on creating photography which needed no language to express.”
Talking about the choice of sunset silhouette photography as his core genre, Thakur says, “After spending months learning photography skills, using a rented camera and sometimes borrowing friend’s camera, I experimented different genres of photography but found my niche in doing sunset silhouette.”
Meanwhile, the pandemic became the near-perfect setting for Thakur to experiment further. “While everyone were locked in their houses due to pandemic, me and my friends Taniket and Dhruv used to go to beach and shoot with sunset. My whole focus was to share more and more sunset silhouettes and reach more people and consistently posting silhouettes bought me into the limelight.”
Talking about his style, Thakur says, “As I love to shoot shadow and convey a story through it I would describe it as ‘bringing shadows to life’.” From borrowing a camera to owning one, Thakur has been inspired by the works of Mitesh Patil and John Marshall.
About his personal favourites among his works, he says “There are many… each one is special and comes with memories behind the entire shoot. It’s difficult to pick one but the one with the football at sunset is at the top for me.”
Thakur believes that the most difficult part of being a photographer is being consistent with work on daily basis and his goal is to master the more complex areas of photography and create many more sunset silhouettes to tell more miraculous stories.
