Photography Prize 2019

New Zealand-based artist Chirag Jindal works at the intersection of documentary journalism, new media art and contemporary cartography. After graduating with his Master’s degree in architecture in 2016, Jindal began an independent practice operating with the model of Eyal Weizman’s 'Forensic Architecture' -the study and production of architectural evidence relating to urban and environmental issues. His current method explores his subjects through the gaze of terrestrial LiDAR -an emerging form of laser imaging applied in surveying landscapes, built environments and archaeological ruins. Using light as a medium, this instrument registers its surroundings as millions of precisely-measured points, translating the physical world into a 3D digital facsimile. When present, colour is sourced from a traditional photographic process, where the saturated hues of textures and surfaces are mapped onto each individual point of data. In ‘Into The Underworld’, Jindal employs this technique to document the lava caves of Auckland -a mythified, dilapidated landscape devastated by a century of rapid urban sprawl. Once the site of burial grounds, war shelters and mushroom farms, the caves are considered wāhi tapu (sacred) by local Māori and are unique to the city’s volcanic region. They are now found under the suburban boundaries of the city, where construction debris, stormwater pipes and rubbish heaps litter the inside. Reduced to urban myth, their existence is no longer common knowledge and ongoing discoveries are ignored by the developers that destroy them. Collaborating with local landowners and city council, Jindal has crawled through roadside manholes and backyard grottoes to document 11 sites across the city. Through exercises in 3D mapping, photography and projection, the project takes an empirical approach to bring something fictionalised and unseen into the domain of public visibility, casting a new mode of light on something to be recognised, preserved and managed as a shared heritage.