“I’ve spent my entire life on the [banks] of the river,” Arko Datto says of growing up in the port city of Kolkata, India, about 96 miles from where the Ganges completes its more than 1,500-mile journey from the Himalaya and flows into the Bay of Bengal. The river has always held a fascination for him, so it’s no surprise that his first long-term project, Gangetic Interludes,explores the inextricable relationship between this epic body of water and the people who depend on it.

“The river has this idea of something which is in permanent movement. It becomes the only constant while everything around it changes,” Datto says, referencing the kingdoms, civilizations, and empires that have come and gone along