Since his early years studying political science in Pune, India, Panjiar has been preoccupied with the plight of marginalized people. “I didn’t do fashion, sports, wildlife or any of that,’” says the self-taught photographer. “I had a one-track mind. I was interested in society and politics — I traveled so much that I understood the pulse of that.” Unlike many of his peers in the 70s, who took exoticized photographs of India for coffee-table books, he trained his lens on more challenging subjects. Going beyond a fleeting glance at people and events, he sought to uncover deeper narratives.

For his latest project, he spent time in rural India photographing women and young girls who have to walk for hours every day to find drinking water. He was invited by Kohler to travel across the subcontinent and document the company’s Safe Water for All initiative, which helps bring clean water and sanitation to communities worldwide. “People know women still have to go and fetch water. But what do those women feel? How do you photograph that?” asks Panjiar. “There’s a drudgery involved for the women, but they have dignity, which you have to respect. It takes strength to cope with that and still carry on with your life and have ambition.” To draw attention to the plight of these women, he has curated a virtual and a physical exhibition of his work alongside a few other photographers’ set to open at the Kohler Design Center in Wisconsin this month. 

In recent years, Panjiar’s images have been cropping up in exhibitions in Barcelona, London, Mumbai and Tokyo, among other cities. Juggling multiple roles, he curates major art festivals, mentors young photographers and has served on the jury of prestigious prizes including the World Press Photo Awards and Pictures of the Year International (POYi). However, he’s perhaps best known for his documentary photography work for international nonprofit organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, American India Foundation and UNFPA.

Raising awareness about health, education and livelihood issues across Asia and Africa has now come to the forefront of Panjiar’s work. After a three-decades-long career as a photojournalist and picture editor, working for various publications including India Today, Time magazine and The New York Times, he reached a turning point. “When I studied journalism, there was an in-your-face approach to events, but somewhere along the way I felt it wasn’t working for me,” he says. “I started being more reflective. There was a change from focusing on the ‘what’ to the ‘how?’” He had this realization in the mid-nineties when confronted with a child widow. He photographed the young girl after she lost her husband to caste violence, and when they met she was cowering beneath a pink sari outside her mud hut. “How could I ever explain through a photograph what this kid was feeling? It was impossible. That was a challenge,” he recalls. “Something happened where I said, ‘I need to start looking at this.’” In 2001, he struck out on his own and veered away from mainstream media towards projects that were more meaningful to him.

Panjiar became passionate about working with nonprofit organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he had a chance to take more nuanced portraits of members of struggling communities. In Africa, for example, while documenting ailing malaria patients, he also captured a striking image of a mother and her baby in their home in a Tanzanian village. Through a cobalt blue mosquito netting we see the woman, magnificently dressed and exuding a sense of dignity. As Panjiar explains, “The power of art is not in providing information alone. It also has an emotional appeal and it’s open to interpretation.”

Similarly, the images he’s shot for Kohler’s Safe Water for All project tell a complex story. Panjiar first began working with Kohler in 2016 after he was invited to accompany Laura Kohler on a visit to a slum in New Delhi. They hit it off and he began documenting Kohler’s water and sanitization project, the results of which formed the seed of the exhibition. It took multiple visits before Panjiar felt he had enough material to make up an insightful show. 

The exhibition opens with a visceral black-and-white video of women fetching water. Created by filmmaker Ragini Deshpande, Panjiar’s wife, the images repeat to echo the monotony of the task. “This sets you into experiencing what these people go through,” says Panjiar. Some of the schoolgirls he photographed would do 20 trips a day to fetch water, while during the dry months other women walk as far as four kilometers to dig for water in riverbeds. Several images expose the women’s vulnerabilities. For example, one photograph shows a young girl leading a group up a slope as she stretches her arms above her head to balance a pot of water, her fingers barely grasping the heavy vessel.

On the other end of the spectrum, we see more uplifting images such as the tightly cropped portrait of a young schoolgirl grinning widely as she relishes a sip of clean water. Panjiar also selected exuberant shots taken in Africa and Southeast Asia by other photographers. “These images show how good water and sanitation can empower and bring happiness,” he explains. The show is more than just an art exhibition; as Panjiar describes it, it’s a form of advocacy to raise awareness about protecting the environment and inspire people not to waste water.

When Panjiar began his journey as a journalist, teasing out subtle narratives was hardly a priority for news organizations, but working on social issues has transformed him. “I am no longer interested, for example, in just covering a riot. I’m interested in photographing hatred itself,” he says. “Now I believe we should have an opinion. We shouldn’t be unbiased.” This resolve and sense of purpose are what set his work apart. As curator Sanjeev Saith put it when describing  Panjiar’s images, “When we look at a photograph, we view a slice of someone’s life. Sometimes, though not very often, we get a bit more of the loaf.”