About Abhay Desai

Electrical engineer, then data scientist, then AI engineer. I did the sensible thing for a decade. This is what I did with the rest of the time.

I'm Abhay, the face behind The Inordinary. The urge to make things showed up early. My dad would wake me for the Saturday cartoon marathon, and I'd race through my homework in class just to free up the rest of it for drawing Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon into an artbook I eventually lost across a dozen house moves. People have wanted me to be plenty of things since: a monk, a public speaker, a husband, a soccer player. But a visual storyteller is the one I always knew I wanted, and the one I've quietly chased across three continents and five cities while the day job paid for it.

I can't help looking for meaning in the mundane: the upside in a struggle, the beauty in something plain. A lot of that comes from a story my mentor told me as a teenager. Dattatreya is a sage in Hindu tradition who moved through the world without an agenda, open to being taught by everything around him until he had made teachers, gurus, of them all. That's how I try to work. I don't chase a picture; I let myself be led, and follow whatever means something.

That's the real work, and it's bigger than photographs. I'm an art director and visual storyteller: street is where my eye was trained and where I still live, but the same eye runs through portrait and lifestyle, brand and editorial, and more and more into motion. Whatever I'm pointing it at, I'm not just stitching pretty pictures together. The question is always the same. What does this mean? How does it move me? I care less about what something looked like than how it felt, and my hope is that it moves you the way it moves me, somewhere past the surface.

Written down it sounds serious, but this is exactly what's kept creating as play. I've always been a storyteller, long before I could name it, and I like holding every part of it: the concept, the mood, the frames, the edit.

I've told you a little of my story, in the hope that you might like me to help tell yours.