This panel brings together three artists, each working with photobooks in various ways and from diverse perspectives. Through the Offset Projects imprint, photographer and curator Anshika Varma engages with photography and bookmaking as spaces of community and reflection.
Photographer, designer, and publisher Nicolas Polli founded Ciao Press as a publishing playground in 2017 and uses it to publish projects across art, photography, illustration, and design, driven by a love for beautiful objects.
Photographer Shahria Sharmin recently published her first photobook, Call Me Heena, bringing a decade-long project documenting the lives of Bangladesh’s Hijra community into book form.
Building Books, Building Worlds: A Conversation on Photobook Practices
Anshika Varma, Nicolas Polli, and Shahria Sharmin in conversation with Vincent Hasselbach
Vincent Hasselbach
Vincent Hasselbach conducts research and curates exhibitions on and around photography and archival practices. He is part of the curatorial team at Peckham 24 and is currently a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at University College London. His research focuses on photographic archives and the images they house, particularly in relation to imaginaries of the future, potential histories, and conceptualisations of the state.
Anshika Varma
Anshika Varma’s practice engages with images and the many worlds that reside within them. Working across photography, publishing, and curation, she studies and investigates how personal, collective, and mythical histories shape and build relationships between individuals and their environments. Her work foregrounds memory, inheritance, and loss, exploring the quiet materiality of objects as vessels of identity and sites of shared experience.
Central to her practice is the book as both an artistic medium and a democratic space, one that resists exclusivity and expands access to artistic expression. This ethos guides Offset Projects, the publishing imprint, art-book library, and curatorial initiative she founded. Through collaborative and experience-led programs in photography, including exhibitions, residencies, workshops, reading rooms, artist talks, and decentralized formats of publishing, she positions the book as a site of companionship and support, centering relationship-building as the core tenet of building work.
Nicolas Polli
A photographer, graphic designer, and teacher from Switzerland, Nicolas Polli enjoys shifting between personal and commercial matters. He studied Art Direction at ECAL, École Cantonal d’art de Lausanne, where he currently teaches both the MA in Photography and BA in Visual Communication.
In 2012, he co-founded YET Magazine, a thematic photography publication that ended after 12 issues in 2020. In 2018, Nicolas founded his own publishing playground, CIAO Press, focusing on the edge between photography and contemporary art. Since 2016, he has been developing an independent studio (Atelier CIAO) and emphasizing editorial design as well as still life photography. In 2018 and 2020, Nicolas won the Swiss Design Award, and since 2021, he has been a resident at Atelier Robert in Biel/Bienne.
Nicolas has collaborated with international publishing houses, including Self Publish Be Happy, Witty Books, Éditions Images Vevey, Skinnerboox, Eriskay Connection, Overlapse, Edition Patrick Frey, L’Artiere, and RVB Books, among others. He has also published four monographs: Ferox: The Forgotten Archives 1976–2010; When Strawberries Will Grow on Trees, I Will Kiss U; One Bed, Two Blankets, Seventy-six Rules (with Sabine Hess); and Where Moonlight Shadows Palms and Trees, U Will Dream of Apples and Grapes.
Shahria Sharmin
Shahria Sharmin is a visual artist and documentary photographer based in Dhaka. With a background in Public Administration, she turned to photography to explore questions of identity, belonging, and gender. Her practice is rooted in long-term, empathetic engagement, often concentrating on stories of family, loss, and social exclusion. Shahria uses the camera not only as a tool of witnessing but as a means of building connection. She prefers a slow, tactile approach and frequently works with a hand-built wooden street box camera, a process that invites intimacy, trust, and shared time.
Her work sits at the intersection of tenderness and quiet resistance, offering visual meditations on lives lived at the margins. Her photobook Call Me Heena was recently published by Dienacht Publishing in July 2025 and launched during the opening week of Les Rencontres d’Arles.