Tanmay Saxena on leaving a banking job to make surreal photographs about life's stranger moments

Even superheroes need a day off sometimes. For London-based photographer and artist Tanmay Saxena, this rather amusing thought became the starting point for Superhero Downtime, a photograph made earlier this year during a period when his own creative powers weren't quite firing on all cylinders. As anyone who's experienced a creative block will know, it's an uncomfortable feeling, particularly when making things is such a big part of who you are. So, naturally, Tanmay decided to make something out of it.

"It's very personal to me," he says. "I shot it earlier this year while going through a minor creative drought. It is a self-assuring and reflective piece about the lulls that come without warning but have the potency to make one feel very lost and confused." He also appreciates the irony of creating something from a momentary lack of creativity, which feels rather fitting for an artist whose work frequently finds humour and meaning in life's peculiarities.

Originally from India, Tanmay moved to London around 18 years ago and spent a decade working as a business analyst at a bank in the City. It was a career that, despite its longevity, never quite felt right. "That was not what I was naturally meant to do, and so a sadness became part of my daily life," he recalls. "It was only after I gave that life up and took up art that I began my second life."

That second life has since seen him explore photography, moving image fabric and painting, creating curious, often surreal scenes that draw on everything from personal memories and nostalgia to the lives of people he's encountered. His work has also appeared in exhibitions at London's National Portrait Gallery, Helm Gallery and HBH Gallery, among others.

Spend some time looking through his photographs, and there's a dreamlike quality to them, as though something familiar has been plucked from everyday life and given a slightly uncanny feeling. His subjects are often solitary, caught in moments of contemplation, while the ideas behind them can be deeply personal or wonderfully strange.

As for where these ideas come from, Tanmay isn't entirely sure himself. "I have a very open membrane to catch ideas first. In fact, they just come to me rather than me looking for them," he explains. "I wander around a lot, aimlessly and quite literally. And subconsciously things get registered that at a later moment turn into executable ideas."

Sometimes he'll eventually trace a finished piece back to something he saw or experienced months earlier. Other times, the connection remains a mystery. "Sometimes I do not know why I made what I made," he admits.

One work that took a little more planning is The Tree of She, a piece he'd been hoping to create for almost a year before everything finally fell into place. Drawing on his childhood in India's small towns and villages, it explores the different stages of womanhood through the image of a braid, which becomes a way of thinking about roots, family histories and the passing of time. "I wanted to trace the journey of womanhood as seen by me while growing up in small towns and villages of India," he explains. "The everyday life of a woman through the different phases and ages depicted through her braid/roots and how the world around her flows through it for generations after generations."

This willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads also shapes how Tanmay works behind the camera. He estimates that around 70 per cent of any finished piece comes from his own decisions, while the remaining 30 per cent is down to circumstances beyond his control. He's quite happy with that arrangement, allowing the location, people and unexpected happenings of a shoot to have their say. "When it comes to photographing people, I can catch a glimpse of their mood and energy and let the narration be guided by it rather than being hard-handed about it," he says.

It's perhaps why his work can feel so open to interpretation, with enough familiar details to draw us in and enough unanswered questions to keep us looking. Tanmay is keen to preserve that freedom for his audience, too. Rather than spelling out what each photograph should mean, he prefers to "keep it open-ended and set the viewer on a path that can go anywhere I may not have envisioned".

Next up, he's working on a couple more surreal projects spanning photography and moving image, alongside a solo exhibition bringing the two mediums together. And if Superhero Downtime is anything to go by, even the quieter, less productive moments might end up fighting their way into the work. After all, you never quite know when an idea might arrive.