Put together by ex-Icon editor Debika Ray, issue 1 includes images from The Nepal Picture Library, Randhir Singh, Bharat Sikka and Juergen Telle

Launched on 11 December, a brand new biannual, Clove, has a refreshing take on art and culture. Founded by London-based, British-Indian journalist Debika Ray, the magazine focuses on creative work from South Asia and its global diaspora.

“My impression was always that, in Western media, there was a narrow frame of reference when it came to covering parts of the world beyond North America and Europe,” says Ray, who until recently was senior editor at the architecture and design magazine Icon. “Stories from South Asia or the Middle East are often handled in a distant way, focusing on problems or crises and how people battle against odds to overcome things. I wanted to tell stories from those parts of the world in a way that were built on their own merit.” 

Ray has put together a team that includes art director Simon Kühn (who has worked on titles such as Icon and The Calvert Journal) and design consultant Anja Wohlstrom (who has also worked on Icon, as well as New Statesman and New Humanist Journal), and the first issue features both clean design and a strong photographic element. There are written essays about Himalayan cuisine, post-colonial education, tea, and the sari, for example, but, titled Shifting The Lens, issue 1 also includes images from The Nepal Picture Library, photographs of Bangladeshi architecture by Randhir Singh, photographs of Kashmir by Bharat Sikka, and an article by Kasha Vande, the founder of the Pondi Photo festival in Pondicherry.

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