Public Project
Truck Quarantine
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Truck Quarantine
Location: Bangalore / Kolkata, India
Nationality: India
Focus:
Photographer, Photojournalist, Journalist, Travel, Photo Assistant, Documentary, Arts & Culture, Assignments, Editorial, Artistic
Covering:
Asia,
Skills:
Image Archiving, Audio Recording, Photo Assisting, Photo Editing, Coding HTML, Coding Javascipt, Storyboarding, Web Design, Curating, Photojournalism, Retouching, Web Development
School:
The International Center of Photography
Amidst the unprecedented restrictions of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Truck Quarantine emerges as a powerful experiment in remote documentary-making and collaborative authorship. Responding to the severe mobility restrictions in India, Sayan Hazra orchestrated this work entirely through cross-platform messaging applications, engaging truck drivers stranded on National Highway 6 in Uluberia, West Bengal, as co-creators of the visual narrative.
Unable to traverse the 2,000 kilometers himself, Hazra remotely guided trucker Chandan Kumar Yadav and his fellow drivers Monoj Kumar Gupta and Sukhbindar Singh to photograph and voice-record their lived realities during a 25-day period of forced immobility. Chandan’s voice, recorded from a location just 2.5 kilometers from a formal truck parking zone, serves as the emotional spine of the work. These images—captured by the truckers themselves—defy conventional authorship and align with traditions of participatory photography and visual ethnography, where the camera becomes both witness and agent of empowerment.
The piece channels the lineage of socially-engaged documentary practices, drawing from the ethos of Allan Sekula’s investigations into labor and mobility, as well as the aesthetics of visual activism seen in the work of the collective Camera Obscura. Yet, it also innovates within the constraints of a global health emergency—embracing digital proximity over physical presence, and challenging the assumption that the documentarian must be physically embedded to tell a story with empathy and truth.
Truck Quarantine bears witness to the systemic abandonment experienced by India’s trucking community when the nationwide lockdown—imposed on March 25, 2020—brought the movement of goods to a near standstill. An estimated 300,000 trucks, with goods worth USD 350 billion, were immobilized across Indian highways, exposing the precarity of essential workers within one of the world’s most crucial supply chain networks. For the truckers, "no movement" translated into no income, no food, and no certainty. As companies ceased communication and withheld payments, drivers ran out of cash and hope. This psychological and financial rupture is palpable in every photograph, each voice message—a slow-burning archive of exhaustion, grief, and resilience.
In resisting the spectacle and instead foregrounding testimony, Truck Quarantine transcends reportage. It proposes a methodology of storytelling shaped by constraint, intimacy, and care. It invites the viewer to reconsider the politics of visibility and the ethics of witnessing from afar. In doing so, Hazra not only chronicles a crisis but also proposes a renewed vocabulary for documentary storytelling in an era marked by physical isolation and digital interconnection.
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