Friends, virtually

Photographer Chandan Gomes met 'Tara Banerjee' over Facebook sometime in 2016. It wasn't her real name but they had 25 friends in common, and so he responded when she messaged. They got talking – philosophical, flirtatious, confessional, intimate, erotic, playful, intense, bitter, deeply affecting exchanges about life, death, friends, family, social media protocols, photography, sex, love, pain...everything under the sun. The conversation continued for about a year.

People You May Know is a photo essay, or 'novella' as Gomes calls it, comprising 38 images from this exchange. It's not the whole of it, but "selections that I felt I can share publicly. There are many that I am not comfortable putting out." In July, the work will be unveiled at Rencontres d'Arles, the three-month-long photo festival known for heralding new talent held annually in Arles, a city in the South of France. It's a prestigious platform for the young Delhi-based photographer, who created a stir with his earlier project – This World of Dew, a poignant photo book about a dead eight-year-old girl who drew mountainscapes she'd never seen.

People You May Know is very different. "This work investigates the boundary-less realm of the 'unknown' and 'unseen' and reflects on how people interact and influence one another in the age of social media," writes Devika Daulet-Singh of PHOTOINK gallery, in her brief note to the project.

The title, People You May Know, taken from the Facebook feature that suggests people one might want to connect with, is ironical, of course – a fact underlined in the first slide by the tagline of the poster of Men, Women & Children – 'Discover How Little You Know About The People You Know'. Gomes doesn't know Tara, hasn't seen her, or images of her ever, and has never met her. There're other kinds of irony at work, too. As Gomes found that even when he was "having these conversations in the virtual world, in the real world I was becoming more and more silent and detached".

Most of the images comprise screenshots of the laptop screen showing the Facebook exchanges, but there are other elements too – film posters and stills, pages from Gomes' journal, photographs, etc. Most of these photographs, says Gomes, were taken at the time – sometimes he'd be messaging Tara on Facebook Messenger on his phone in the middle of a shoot. Gomes was then photographing sex-workers in Delhi's GB Road red light district and one woman, in particular, who did not want her face to be visible and yet didn't want to deliberately hide, so all her images show her hand covering part of her face. "Later on, I realised that all the images I was taking of friends, colleagues, strangers – I was avoiding the face altogether. In this conversation, my profile picture keeps changing, but she doesn't. So I am always trying to piece a face."

As the conversation progresses, becoming more impassioned and dark, it becomes a kind of psychological game with Gomes desperate to know Tara's 'real' identity and her deflecting his attempts. "I realised this person could be many things – it could be any of my friends... it could be a spambot, with several people operating the account. The fear was – what if I'm being experimented on? Which is why, in my most vulnerable messages, I write don't f**k with me." In fact, says Gomes, "the reason I first started putting it out [in the public domain] was to rat the person – the idea was, what if I put these conversations out, how would you feel. But the person's view was very clear – because she's anonymous it doesn't matter."

People You... ends – not the 'real' conversation – with Tara agreeing to meet him, dropping hints of where she's likely to be at a certain place, and inviting him to come there. Gomes goes to the place, and there are cryptic images taken at the spots where she'd said she would be, but wasn't.