To touch a photograph

October 23, 2020

There is likely to be some sort of meandering when you pull out an old photograph
(a scratched up print inside a wallet/
an untouched print under glass/
a lonely print that exists only because other prints filled up all the pages before it), and a good place to begin to think about this movement is that stabbing sensation in the gut I’m told is nostalgia.

First we have that initial tug back into the photograph, sitting with the sharp realisation that (this much) time has lapsed since it was taken. That we have moved from a night in the mountains five years ago to this bedroom bathed in afternoon light and everything in between has been left for us to fathom (to recognise, to understand, to fill up, to somehow journey from a winter night to a summer afternoon with god knows how many pairs of rain-destroyed slippers to account for in between) on our own. The photograph exists of a then, and in a now, but the continuity that should have held it together is missing. An effort is made to try and bridge that gap by starting at the very beginning- the evening that it was taken. To sink into the photograph, to grasp at every hint it offers at rebuilding that night with the expectation that we will be welcomed back to relive it exactly as it happened. It’s all going as planned, the seeing just has to catch up with the memory. The dissonance that exists between the way we remember that night and what the picture is showing us hasn’t been acknowledged yet. And before we can explain the rapidly increasing discomfort with the photograph, we’ve done something that is going to make this attempt at reconstruction far more tumultuous than we’d signed up for- we’ve touched it.
We’ve reached out- tenderly, even- and stroked the photograph lying in front of us only to be suddenly, and stingingly, made aware of all that we are not touching. There is only the smooth coldness of paper in place of a warm chest under a scratchy sweater
the flatness of a print that your fingers will search for the rise of veins in- this is not how it felt to hold your hand
the tart smell of ink to show you how much distance (disguised as time) has wedged itself between you and a fragrance that belongs to the night the picture was taken.
The photograph is here, sitting obediently before us, revelling silently in all that it has left behind.

And then we wander in a different direction- not into time but wider around it. The particularities in the photograph begin to allude to universalities. We begin to pay attention to the lengthening capacity of an image- of its potential to let specific elements speak to to a wider range of meaning:
Yes, the wind was sharp that night and the grass was damp and it is always you I think of when the air smells of mogras. But now the photograph also lends itself to other cold nights, and warm nights, and sweaters that hurt less. It has let us pick up something specific from this image and equalise it with the general. Other sunsets. Gentler winds. Perhaps an entire year without any sunsets at all so the photograph begins to feel almost unjust, sitting as easily as it does in that box. We’re presented with the distinctness of the event recorded, but also nudged towards a myriad other memories and possibilities that now live in this print as hyperlinks. An image that was made from a shared evening together is now available to us to use for parts.

Looking at a photograph can be unexpectedly tiring. The visual is jarring in its inadequacy, the image is suddenly linked to memories and ideas that have nothing directly to do with it. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. That’s what that churn in your belly usually is. And the attempt at soothing the ache caused by everything that the photograph hides from us and containing the infinite possibilities that are now carried within it ends up in a little, innocuous gesture- touching the photograph. It is a hopeless act, performed in the quiet awareness that we are too far from what we are searching for. The tenderness comes later.
To look at a photograph and expect to relive a memory is to lose by default. To touch one is to lose twice over, and it probably hurts a lot more.

Almost Self-Portraits

June 15, 2019 in Portrait

Everyone knows what a self-portrait is. There is a camera, a photographer who must also be the subject (or a subject who must also be the photographer), and some sort of frantic running into position before the self-timer goes off.

I started taking photographs of myself a few months ago when everybody around me got tired of being subject to my lens in their faces or ankles. I became the most logistically convenient subject available to me, and thought nothing of it except that based on whatever I knew of being an interesting subject, I seemed to be terrible at it. I was incompetent at 50% of the job that was self-portraiture. There is something both specific and slippery about being on both sides of the lens and it begs a little reflection on what being a subject in this particular situation could mean.

The self-expression angle (and if you like to live life on the edge, self-representation angle) for self-portraiture brings with it a very particular dilemma. ‘Making’ an image requires one to take the material of one’s experiences as it appears and to then treat it with a gentle, investigative eye. To understand and discover, perhaps even unify the layers available to scrutiny and then to find a way to present it all to the viewer. To somehow say “This is me when I’m tired” or “palm leaves blowing in the summer wind take me back to a relatively happy childhood, standing in stark contrast to the anger I feel at the world today as an adult”, while also simply saying “this is me.” To take a surface-level self as a whole, break it down, and burrow deep to acknowledge facets of the self that may now be gently or fiercely entrusted to the viewer (as a gesture of goodwill?), and then find a way to weave these elements back together as a more nuanced-but whole once again- presentation of the self. To retain the selfhood that probably manifests best in an annoyed flick of the wrist or a mole under the chin. Reality 1.0 to abstraction for a reconstructed representation of reality 2.0 (post introspection, post reflection on the problem of Who I Am/What I’m Saying).
And the funny thing about this exercise is that it is predicated largely not just on what one thinks about oneself- an uncomfortable exercise to partake in, like taking a personality quiz- but also on how much the viewer feels inclined to invest in a piece of work that is already characteristically frozen in time, divorced from the history of the subject, separate from future moments that would change that version of that self-portrait.
Nevertheless, we’re here. And the fact that we’ve probably managed to transform something mundane or unpleasant into a beautiful image speaks to, as Sontag puts it, photography’s relative weakness as a means of conveying the truth.

This brings us to another reason why one might want to take a self-portrait: to ‘record’ oneself at a certain age, at a particular time, perhaps in a distinct space that may or may not be home. Maybe one of the more incredible aspects of a self-portrait photograph is it’s inherently subversive nature- the self-portrait, even as a photograph, cannot document. Even in the ethically dubious state of the most credible documentary situations, where situations and circumstances are available for the photographer to swoop in and ‘capture’, a self-portrait can never be a found image. The photographer has too much control over the subject, the subject always knows when the photographer is coming. It is always constructed. And then there is that internal contention between the vision, its translation into an image, and the desperate attempt at retaining any authenticity of emotion while begging the cat not to knock over the tripod. Again. And still, to document oneself as being a certain way during a period in one’s life is considered a fairly standard photographic practice, even when removed from self-portraiture’s other functions of story-telling or artistic expression.

This leaves us in a strange place with respect to my own work. Stacks of paper or a running tap are not symbols I’d use to represent myself had I thought far enough ahead. These images have little to do with a conscious, mindful presentation of the self, or even a deliberate attempt at a story. They remain- for me atleast- empty photographs that make no attempt to bridge the gap between intention, imagery and identity. They offer the viewer little information about the self. Someone else could have (should have?) stood in for me and the image would’ve been come alive in a way that I couldn’t see it happening with myself before the lens. There didn’t seem to be a good enough reason to have me be the subject. These pictures could classify as portraits. Just maybe not self enough to be self-portraits.

The photographs I’m most fond of of the ones I’ve shot are always those of other people, and for good reason. They’re sustained by the strength and narrative and vulnerability of the people who let me shoot them. All I have ever managed to do as a subject is be a mildly gimmicky substitute- founded in logistical convenience- for work that I can make better with other people, subjects whose relationship with the camera is monumentally different than mine.

Of all my ‘self-portraits’, I would really only place a couple into that category- the ones at the top of the post (surprisingly enough from my earliest work, far simpler than later ones). The rest of my non self-portrait portraits are in a subsection of the website titled “Self-portraits”. Maybe it’s time to start filling in that gap with self-portraits that are actually brave enough to live up to the designation. Or to find another sub-heading for a section now awkwardly misnamed.

Home: Shooting in Everyday Spaces

April 14, 2019 in Everyday Spaces, Indoor Photography

There is something to be said for the idea of home, for taking photographs in it.
On one hand, we have a collection of objects put together in a space, taken control over, made to bear witness to our lives over time. A chair, a bed, a desk that has probably seen hours of failure and some amount of laughter and a good measure of despair over the years. And then we have this idea of the photograph- a sliver of time frozen, disconnected from the story that would come after it, as proposed by Berger. A photograph that captures a tiny fragment of the subject before it, divorced from the events that made it or the time that would change its meaning.
So when we put these two things together- a space so intricately intertwined with the history of a person and a device that manages to strip this element away from itself, the result is somewhat strange. We’re left with a photograph of a person surrounded by things that should give us previously untold information about them, but information that can only be limited in what it tells us. Context placed carefully in limited context. The mundane, the everyday being elevated to the position of “beauty” because someone has bothered to take a picture of it. There must be a reason that someone has bothered to take a picture of it. It must be beautiful.

And really what beauty can a photographer (and their mysterious eye) see here? What are they looking for, surrounded by tables and chairs and a bed that knows more about the person before them than they ever will? The case for shooting at home very rarely lies in the glamour of blankets or the harshness of the tubelight overhead. Worse still, the nightmare of every YouTube lighting tutorial that Brandon’s home produced so well: mixed lighting. Daylight, tungsten light, tubelight light all sitting together under a roof like best friends.
It is in the simple fact that you’re taking photos in somebody’s home, and home begins by bringing some space under control. This space that we thought we controlled then goes on to shape the body, force it to give way in as many ways as the body has shaped the space, to move as the home allows it to. While taking photos of Brandon, his home did a bulk of the work:
Picture a body moving slowly, smoothly through a room that is unfamiliar to me. A graceful twisting of the torso, a subtle duck of the head, a quick hand extended to straighten out a perpetually slanted picture frame- movements that are impossible for me to ask of someone in a place that doesn’t know them at all.
Dogs that cannot be coaxed off the bed by someone they know any lesser.

I’ve been shooting people in their homes for a few months now and it would be a lie to claim that it has always been by choice. I’ve thrown around the word “location???” more times than I can be bothered to recall, and have often hated the work that comes out of it.
But there are two things that have remained constant through it all: the sudden awareness that the bedroom I’ve spent four hours of my life in has seen another life go on for years, and the resignation that accompanies the image finally produced. Frozen in time, snatched away from its story, waiting quietly on my camera screen as if sent there to be punished.

Saturday Afternoons: Andrew and Simran

March 05, 2019

Some places, I’m certain, have learned how to exhale slowly, unhurriedly. Mumbai will probably never. I like to think that afternoons in the city are the most predictable sites for lulls, the most consistent lapses from routine mayhem, lined with an undercurrent of wariness that comes from taking a long deep breath and holding it there- deadly still, red faced, always at the precipice of bursting forth suddenly. Somewhere in between the foreseeable amount of pandemonium everyday (shoved hastily between peak hours and peak hours), there is an afternoon. Golden and quiet. Brimming with the potential for slips and slides and lapses from repetition.

Last Saturday afternoon became a lapse created by Andrew and Simran and Frodo the dog- a very particular concoction of two people in love and shy dog who wants to be a model.
The premise of lapses is that they are a precise, specific set of conditions that come together to create an atmosphere that depends entirely on the presence of these variable factors. A place is taken and turned into a space (a sliver of de Certeau here to add some credibility to this proposition) when its subjects actively act upon it, contextualize it in time and space. So we shall add some accuracy here and say instead: two people in love and a shy dog who wants to be a model in the late afternoon glow, lounging on their front porch with a beer each in hand and no beers for the dog.
And what is my job as a photographer then, while these myriad special factors start working together to turn the front porch into a space that exists in this capacity for only a single afternoon? To make sure they pose appropriately as a young couple in love? To position them into the light and focus on Simran’s hair turning into a furnace before me?
What are these factors that I can isolate to focus on, to best capture the ‘essence’ of this afternoon? Maybe it is that in my five years of friendship with Andrew I have never visited his home before sundown. Or Simran’s nervous laughter every time I say “relax your shoulders and look this way!” or Andrew’s glass of beer sitting in the sun and perspiring. Maybe it is the suspicion that somewhere else on this street, at this very moment, someone is blowing gently into their cup of chai, someone else is fighting with their aunt, another person is pining for a breeze decidedly more familiar than the one available on sale here (an expensive affair, this fresh air).

But perhaps it is all of these things together that made Simran and Andrew’s afternoon the way it was, so typical of pauses offered to us by the city. A routine arrested mid breath, a fleeting in-betweenness where mouthfuls of air- more than your fair share in this city- are being shoved down your lungs lest this be the last time you are allowed to sit and be. And so I continued to point a camera in their faces and hoped they were catching the light appropriately.
Green leaves turned neon. White bougainvillea leaves turned transparent. My blue jeans turned less blue from sliding all over the porch floor for an Optimum Angle.
Andrew and Simran laughed a lot.

Sontag proposed that any photograph can offer only a tiny semblance, a small fragment of information about the subject before you. If one of photography’s jobs is to accurately represent, it certainly does a limited job of it. So if the photos I took that day will only ever be fraction of everything that evening became, I will know it is a job done as it was supposed to be done. It would be a terribly disappointing experience to someday pick up an old photograph and think “this is exactly how that afternoon was.”