Ravi Agarwal has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, photographer, environmental campaigner, writer, curator. He is the founder and director of the NGO Toxics Link, which combats environmental destruction caused by rapid urbanization in India, through his nonprofit work. Photography is an integral part of his activism. 

For Agarwal, the heavily-polluted Yamuna River, the largest tributary of the Ganges, is a metaphor for the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Part of a series of photographs and a video created during an eco-art residency, Agarwal traces the journey of the river through densely populated urban areas to fields of marigolds, a site for farming, religious ceremonies, and now real estate development. Agarwal has been documenting this river since the 1990s and in 2011 he held a public art festival on the river, hoping to inspire good stewardship by drawing crowds to see the site firsthand.