Yash Sheth’s Monsoon Project documents

Yash Sheth’s Monsoon Project began in 2021 as an attempt to capture the beauty of Mumbai in the rain. The project started with umbrellas, saturated colours and the shift in city temperament when rains first arrive in June. Over five years, Sheth’s focus expanded beyond personal memory to document climate change impacts across India. He now studies the Indian monsoon as a force shaping lives from flood-prone neighbourhoods to agricultural communities. Sheth says climate change has delayed monsoons and made them more intense when they arrive, often flooding regions and disrupting crop cycles. To anticipate storms, he uses the Indian Meteorological Department website to track rainfall predictions, then takes local trains to affected areas in Mumbai and waits for rain to begin. His work has taken him beyond Mumbai to rural areas where livelihoods depend on knowing when rain will fall. In flood-prone informal settlements, heavy rainfall forces families to move to upper floors or leaves homes waterlogged for days. Sheth describes his approach as deeply collaborative: he speaks with residents, shares images via WhatsApp, and returns to villages where families now invite him for lunch. He calls the project a tree with one trunk and many branches, now including writing, research and archiving alongside photography. Sheth, trained as an engineer, began photography casually during university with a cheap DSLR. After three years supervising fibre-optic cable installations, he left the job to pursue photography full-time. He studied compositions on YouTube and Magnum Photos for hours, but now says his training runs subconsciously when he shoots. His Instagram features experimental, surreal compositions, tight frames, intense flash in bright sun, and attention to detail like a goat with watermelon on a beach or a man painted metallic at a bodybuilding championship. Other series include gold pomfret necklaces in fishing villages, underground queer parties, and staged-looking playground shots he insists were unplanned. Sheth says his obsessive relationship with monsoon weather has led him to study meteorology directly. He moves with the clouds, using weather data to position himself where rain is falling or predicted. The Monsoon Project is not solely about Bombay rains anymore, he explains, but a national study of how changing rainfall patterns affect people across the country.