Sangram Biswas – Urbana Americana

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

A contemporary trend in photobooks is to be clever and mix in various and sundry subjects in an attempt to add meaning and depth. Sometimes this works, but often it doesn’t and just comes across as empty attention seeking.

Artists who share meaningful issues stand out. Usually it is because they have something to say and because they present their ideas directly, engaging viewers with a message that is clear, that makes sense, and that you can understand and appreciate.

Sangram Biswas’ Urbana Americana works like that. Biswas is from India and the book is about the cultural dislocation he experienced living in a small midwestern American town, presumably Urbana, Illinois.

The photos are mundane, everyday views of people and places. We see details of suburban life – empty lots, backyards, houses, woods, a cornfield next to a new street, ducks on a pond, an earnest-looking young woman, a man with a snow shovel pausing his work to pose for a picture.

Interspersed among the photographs are dated texts that read like diary entries. They include Biswas’ thoughts, memories, and nostalgia for his home and family in Bengal as well as notes on challenges and on his tentative social beginnings. The texts are brief but poignant and evocative. Backed by the photographs they set up the situation memorably.

Here is Biswas explaining it:

Urbana Americana emerges from a journey into an unfamiliar place and an attempt to understand it. It is an outsider’s perspective. Not because I resisted belonging, but because I could not, not entirely. I was born and raised in rural Bengal, India, and later moved to a small town in the American Midwest. This transition brought me into a world markedly different from the one I had always known.

Growing up exposed to American pop culture gave me a false sense of familiarity. The America I arrived in, however, was quieter, slower, and more withdrawn than I had imagined. The warmth and openness of my own cultural background did not easily find a place here.

This collection reflects my attempt to navigate that gap. In moments of homesickness, I returned to an old companion: the land. In its stillness, I discovered fragments of familiarity. Street corners, backyards, and quiet scenes resonated with something I knew deeply. Through these encounters, I began to understand the place on its own terms.

Like a short poem that leaves you enthralled, Urbana Americana shows how far you can go with a slender zine format done right. With its 17 photographs and 7 journal entries it is a humble publication that punches way above its weight. There are hefty photo-tomes with five times as many images that do not do half as much.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Sangram Biswas – Urbana Americana

Photographer: Sangram Biswas (born in India,1990; lives in San Diego)

Language: English

Text: Sangram Biswas

Design: Phillip Kalantis-Cope and Sangram Biswas

Printing: Dixon Graphics

Saddle stitched softcover; 17 photographs; 28 pages; 5.5 X 8.5 inches: unpaginated; ISBN 978-1-962415-17-0

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.