rumination on amateur photography

I am not a professional photographer, nor have I been formally trained in the skill in any manner. However, like almost anyone with an eye, and set of sensibilities, I have attempted to capture in frames, scenes, vistas, drawing, and also squalor and filth - whenever they depict themselves to me in a composition which warrants memory.

Take this photograph for instance. The photo op was actually spotted by a friend with whom I was walking by the street then. I depicted a picture of life uncontained by the walls of the city - a bathtub, an intimate bathroom appliance usually found in luxurious apartments, was out there by the sidewalk. It also depicts a practice which many in the developed world would not be familiar with, of bathing publicly on the street, making use of the abundant water supply which may be scarese at home. You can see a bucket there and something which appears to be a bag, with piped water supply available. Beside it on a line is a shirt put up to dry; a picture of domestic life beyond the confines of the house - this appealed to me.

Photography, while static, can still express ideas - such as the one above, and when we situate them in their cultural and historical moment, something like a narrative emerges, a new way of life arranging the assemblages it uses for itself. A violation perhaps, of the norms of domesticity and the public sphere - this in fact was a dichotomy which very much preoccupied me at the time as a university student studying sociology.

A subject which I have never approached in the realm of photography is portraiture. A gaze that looks directly at me always invokes in me the desire to engage in a dialogue, perhaps obsessively and I suppose this is how all those opportunities were wasted away. However, I do believe that it is possible to capture, or better yet express the inner workings of the life of a person in representing how they engage with the world which they live in. There are of course exceptions, such as when one is engaged in an adventure - yet let me offer you an example of the former first.

While strictly speaking this is in no way a portrait, I think we learn about the habits and mores - which perhaps may even indicate a pattern of thought in bringing out the activities which a subject may be engaged in, in this sense - it actually tells us something about circumstance and habit which a face shot, may perhaps only invoke in emotion. That aside, I appreciate this picture for aesthetic reasons alone. The darkness of the kitchen, augments the brightly coloured vegetables, and the drama of the contrast is presented in a pleasing composition of the door opening out to the light outside - almost like the old Danish painters who meditated on pictures in relation to points of illumination which can completely reconfigure a visage - this is morning, and we would see a completely different picture, and perhaps mood were this shot to be at dusk with a yellow bulb illuminating the kitchen. These are the kind of stories I think photography can tell.

There is something to this, the absence of a human subject. Maybe it is a style of composition which elicits a perspective to come in, observe and inhabit the circumstances of a life. An invitation, a sort of welcome. A study of how a perspective would inhabit, or better yet engage with or change such situations - this is how the French phenomenologists attempt to depict a kind of hyper humanism, a study of philosophy as it may be. Yet, such a characterisation does not appeal to me, so I don't follow their argument.

In such an analysis, what I believe is underplayed is novelty, the encounter and radical difference - themes which perhaps are more conducive to the genre of adventure, when a practice is not entirely engaged towards producing something new, which can really be accomplished anywhere. Yet in following these generic habits, lets see an example.

I choose this picture to show how an adventure does not require to be novel in the elements of its composition to become adventurous. The excitement of an encounter, essentially is what animates that in us which responds to a composition, which removes the sediments of mundanity and repetition so characteristic of a life seeped in habit, not guided by a constructivist principle. For it is easy to lose yourself in a reactionary clinging to habituation, essentially conditioning when the senses are not developed to appreciate the uses of faculties.

A street, in evening lamp lit illumination reveals encounters, which when focussed on are almost always unfamiliar - indistinct even apart from the brief snapshot of faces and profiles, assessments, a gauging of others. The speed of this happening and it's intimacy offset by the mechanical velocity of cars driving by just adjacent. Multiple points of illumination explore how colour interacts with canopies and shadow in this assemblage which invokes in an observer the movement so characteristic of a city, yet in a light untainted, or perhaps painted over by its saturation of points of reference, unknown, non-habitual. A sense of the passing of time is glimpsed in the cobblestone sidewalk, a rarity nowadays on the streets of Kolkata.

A gaze such as this perhaps invokes the flaneur of yesteryears, and may be improved upon were it to be set aside against a study of hawkers on the sidewalk.

These miniature case studies as it were, while limited in selection, are placed against not only the elements of their compositions, immanent to the frame - yet in presenting their frames, composed of an angle and exposure, also respond to the customs of the usual perception governing the situations which they represent, a kitchen, bathtub, sidewalk, etc.

Yet, as a photographer - there is a moment in the sense of aesthetic representation searching for its object, that responds, not merely to the beauty of what is seen, yet is underlined by the sediments of what make each of these moments distasteful, a moment of exception as it were. Conversely, and this is perhaps best left underdeveloped here, Walter Benjamin once remarked that there is no document of civilization which is not also a document of its barbarity. May photography allow us to consider this statement in a new light.

Having arrived at a picture one may believe is worth representing, for photography like all art, trades in representations - adjusting the frame which allows in the exposure being looked for, followed by the click of a button is the act that defines the mechanical habits of a picture taker. Not unlike, a websurfer browsing the net. There is of course the significant addition of walking if the picture is outside.

The selection in question, the searching of a composition is perhaps the labor that a photographer engages in - and in this, it is often met with resistance, which in this field perhaps exemplifies itself by an attachment to perceptions, or rather ideas which a position may not want to re-invent. Such a position, is never without reason, however reactionary it may be.

A question may be posed, is that which is reactionary, merely familiar, the habitual, the same?

You will readily recognize, that even holding on to that which is familiar, requires a certain kind of labor - like gardening for instance, a careful and habitual tending, if there ever were one. There may even be a pleasure to this - watching shoot and twig, give way to leaf. In the sphere of this miniature botanical utopia - the glorification of the small bonsai plant which the above picture is like a little shrine to, the effort to take care of, to look after the flora is evident. However, the seasonality of planting, is perhaps a timeframe beyond the purview of the lens in question, which merely highlights the green of spring and blossoms - health, fertility etc. a certain glory for sure.

In my brief curation, I have endeavored to represent how I have, within the limitations of my circumstance, come upon identifiable photo ops, the kind of themes which have appealed to me - and what I have tried to represent through the images. I have even briefly mentioned the kind of resistance a photographer may come across, and if you notice, the absence of portraiture in the above selection is a testament to this. Not one that I regret, yet let me mention briefly, that the request to picture someone becomes meaningful when the composition appeals to, augments, or perhaps critiques, a kind of shared sensibility. And for reasons, not entirely interesting, faces do not hold this for me. However, perhaps in the spirit of completion, allow me to offer one.

This is basically a selfie, and while facing up to a lens, the presentation of a face arranges itself, keeping in mind the eye of the viewer, it also bears a trace of its present situation. In this sense, the act itself is a kind of presentation, yet one delimited by the form of its rendering - the frame of a camera. I believe that there is much more that one's faculties can do than to meditate on a head, and that it may even be of instruction and pleasure to use one's senses and appreciation of customs, styles, counterpoint, and composition to attempt to depict the lived immediacy of situations, like those in a street, gathering, kitchen of wherever to represent the texture and kind of pleasure which the faculty of sight may reveal.

Allow me to leave you with one last example that I believe may approach this.

While the presentation of fruit in a basket, has always been an exercise in capture and representation of multiple fields in the visual arts, it is by this very practice, which serves as a habituation, limited to a task designed to hone skills, and essentially an offering, not unlike at all the contents of its subject. This along with a lamp and phone, with mellow light depict a sensibility of a shareable space, comfort and domesticity which does not have to engage with the adventure and encounter spoken of earlier. However, perhaps also, by the same token, presenting an opportunity, maybe out of frame, for practices that call for an attentive disposition, sensitive to aesthetic sensibilities and their underpinnings.