Wawso lives and works in Udaipur, India but he was born in 1953 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He started his career in art as a photographer renowned for his hand-painted, sepia-toned images of India. “I remember taking my first photograph, a shaky snap of my mom and dad and brother. The little black box camera was just an idle fascination, but when the tilted image came back from the drugstore I had my first true inkling of the wonder of photography.” says Wawso. In parallel to his photography work, the artist also collaborated with the miniaturist painter, Rakesh Vijay, to create an autobiographical picture-story of his life in India. His quirky characters bear Indian colors and merge a millennial art with a contemporary vision of identity and his sense of Western privilege having only moved to India in 2005. This piece, called “The Village People Treat Me Like a King—homage to BB” says it all.
