The Gathering Project

Mahakumbh (noun): The great confluence. A meeting of sacred rivers, of faith, and of humanity at a scale the world has no other word for.

Once every 144 years, the banks of the Ganges at Prayagraj become home to the largest peaceful gathering in human history. In January 2025, an estimated 400 million people made their way there — on foot, by train, by boat — drawn by belief, by tradition, by something older than either.

This project documents that gathering. Not its spectacle, but its stillness. Not the crowd, but the individuals inside it. The aerial views that reveal the incomprehensible scale of human faith, and the quieter frames that ask what brings a person to travel thousands of miles to stand at the edge of a river.

It was the first personal project I dedicated entirely to people and culture. The response — more than fifteen international awards, including the IPA Event Photographer of the Year — exceeded anything I had anticipated. But what stayed with me was simpler than any of that: the feeling of being inside something that will not happen again in my lifetime.