Shristi Dutta moved to Berlin two years ago, leaving India to live abroad for the first time. Photography became one of the ways she learned the city—and one of the ways the city slowly became personal.
Her photographs move between portraits, friendships, lakes, streets and the fragments of everyday life that begin to feel meaningful only after they have been repeated enough times to become familiar.
Learning a city by photographing it
Dutta began taking photographs around the age of fourteen or fifteen, first with a phone and later with the DSLR her family kept for special occasions. Curiosity gradually became a serious practice and eventually a career.
Today she photographs people most often, both commercially and artistically. But moving to Berlin introduced another subject: the process of building a relationship with a place.
When she first arrived, the city was new in every direction. She was adjusting to a different country, language and culture while living away from India. Photography gave her a reason to explore without needing to understand everything immediately.
Schlachtensee and the moment Berlin felt like home
Schlachtensee became one of Dutta’s personal refuges. The lake offers calm when the city becomes overwhelming, but one photograph made the place especially important.
She photographed her closest friend there while they were swimming. Dutta was standing on the shore, her friend in the water, and the light falling across the lake made the scene feel cinematic.
The friendship itself had grown from Berlin. They met at an art exhibition after Dutta arrived without knowing anyone in the city, and over time the relationship became part of what transformed Berlin from a place she lived into somewhere that felt like home.
“Finding that friendship was part of what made Berlin start to feel like home.”
Building her own map
Dutta is still discovering Berlin. She returns to lakes and green spaces, but also to Friedrichshain and Museumsinsel. A recent visit to Spandau Citadel felt almost like entering another city entirely.
She describes the process as building her own map of Berlin: not simply learning where places are, but accumulating associations, friendships and memories until geography becomes personal.
Carrying a camera changes that map. Walking with friends or moving through the city, she notices small scenes she might otherwise pass without stopping.
The photograph that changed after leaving home
One photograph of her mother became more important only after Dutta moved away.
They have always had a good relationship, although Dutta describes herself as having been closer to her father. Distance made her realise how rarely she had photographed her mother. The image now carries a different weight because it represents someone whose everyday presence once felt too ordinary to need recording.
The experience changed what she wants to photograph when she returns home.
A roll from India
The roll that matters most to Dutta was made during her first return to India after spending a year living alone in Berlin. It contains portraits of family and close friends as well as photographs from a trip celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday.
Looking back at those images brings back memories of that first visit home, her family and her close friends.
The useful distance of analogue photography
Dutta enjoys that film does not allow immediate confirmation. She describes the process almost as a gamble: the photograph disappears after the shutter is pressed and returns later, sometimes after she has forgotten making it.
That delay changes memory.
When the scans arrive, an image can feel like discovering evidence of a moment she did not realise she had preserved. The lack of immediate feedback makes photography feel less controlled and, for her, more magical.
In Between
Her current project, In Between, moves away from direct portraiture toward absence. Dutta is interested in making photographs in which people are not necessarily visible, but traces of them remain.
The project looks at what is left behind: objects, spaces, gestures and environments that imply human presence without describing a person directly.
It is a natural extension of the way memory already operates in her photographs. A place can hold a friendship. A family portrait can grow more meaningful with distance. A forgotten frame can return months later carrying a feeling its maker did not fully understand when she exposed it.
For Dutta, photography has become a way of exploring both the city around her and the distance between presence and memory. Berlin is still unfinished for her—and that may be precisely why she continues wanting to photograph it.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the photographs we encounter.
See more of Shristi’s photographs on Instagram at @_shristidutta.
