Sathish Kumar

Sathish Kumar was born in 1986 in Kanchipuram, India, and is based in Chennai. He is a documentary photographer who shoots on film and on point-and-shoot cameras and prints on paper and, in one series, on metal sheets. He studied visual communication at the University of Madras, graduating in 2006.

He came to photography through school holidays in his uncle's photo studio in Bengaluru, and his first camera, a film camera, was a gift from that uncle. Town Boy (2011 to 2020) follows small-town and city life in South India. Sunlight was begun in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Bond, made with a point-and-shoot camera and printed on metal sheets, follows his brother, who works in Abu Dhabi, and the brother's family, alongside images of the family house under construction in Bengaluru.

Town Boy was presented at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2022 through the Serendipity Arles Grant, and was a finalist for the Invisible Photographer Asia Awards in 2018. His work was shown in Growing Like A Tree: Static In The Air at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2021), and his moving-image work Bubble was shown in the Chennai Photo Biennale (2024 to 2025). Sunlight had a solo presentation in Experimenter's Artists for Artists series, Kolkata (2025), and Bond was shown in Vantage Point 13 at Sharjah Art Foundation (2026).