It is instinctive to think of marginalised people inhabiting a space somewhere across the borders of our bustling cities but an ongoing exhibition by Iranian photographer Mehrdad Ramezannia shows that the “outsiders” live in our midst and mingle with us in the same physical area. We just don’t notice them.

Dreamscape, for instance, has two security guards asleep near a circle of lily plants at Lodhi Garden. “Lodhi Garden is the haunt of the powerful. The guards are supposed to protect the grounds not enjoy them,” explains Ramezannia. Ironically, the crow in the picture has a greater right to be present in the lush lawn than the men who tend to it.

Called “Around the Corners”, the exhibition at the Auditorium Foyer, Centre for Art and Aesthetics, JNU, is a product of five years of shooting “thought-provoking scenes” in Delhi, Kolkata, Agra and Kathmandu. Ramezannia, 35, arrived in India in 2004 to study MPhil in history at JNU and is now a research scholar there. “I’ve begun to understand the chronic loneliness of people living on the fringes of these cities,” he says. They range from migrants in Kathmandu to the street child staring at a white Ambassador behind huge gates.

Apart from Dreamscape, all photographs are in black-and-white as Ramezannia shows how it is not always people who crush the marginalised — even architecture highlights their solitary existence. The puny woman gazing through the a crumbling house, the man treading past DDA flats, the skeletal rickshaw-puller asleep on his vehicle, don’t they belong here?

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