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.”
