Here’s a clip from my kickstarter for my first monograph .
It’s available on Amazon I believe or through my publishers Fall Line press.
Some time ago, I did a podcast for UNOFPhotography with the amazing Scott Grant, which pretty much was the same text
Or, read the transcript here:
Photography to me, is no different than writing fiction really which is my first vocation. It is a way of trying to understand something; a way to explain to myself— an idea, a world. A way of reconciling; a way of exploring something I don’t know, that I am curious about. A way of answering questions which may never have clear answers. That’s what photography and fiction both mean to me.
I started photographing at a time when I was very unwell and it became impossible to write, to even think about writing. Photography was easier, in that in writing, you spend minutes, hours, days even, trying to go over and over a sentence, trying to capture that twinkle of an idea that’s been hanging over your head. It’s there, it’s right in front of you but you just can't get to it. With a camera, if you’re lucky to chance upon it, you just hit ‘click’. And you have it, In an instant. Sometimes you don’t even know what you have till you see it later. But deep in your gut, you know you have something. IT.
Off-late, I have been working on a new project on cities and photography for me, has come to mean two things in the process: creating and tracing memories. Ironically, the creating memories has been in Calcutta, a city where I grew up but left when I was seventeen. Where I should have had many memories.
But I don’t. I remember my childhood like fleeting scenes from a film. Photography has been a way of re-discovering and re-inventing memories. Admiring the city through adult eyes. Actually. realizing, for the first time in my life, that I can live here. That I love living here. I had hated this city growing up.
In New York, a city I lived in as an adult, from the age of nineteen onwards, I found myself returning after a five year absence, walking through the same streets, the same houses, the same bars I used to visit when I had first arrived.
I’m twenty years older now. But it was that old life, that young me, I look for on the streets, in the windows, with my camera. Here, photography was not a way of discovering but of remembering. Maybe things I had run away from when I moved back to India.
Ironic isn’t it? Because it is usually. the very distant past, the childhood, that one. tries to remember. Not the past that is closer to you.
I think with each new project, photography has come to mean something else, something more. With my first project, Photowali Didi, where I had been documenting the residents of a Basti, or slum, as it is called in English, it was a way of making this city my own again. I had left Calcutta when I was seventeen and only moved back few years ago. I had no adult memories in this city. No space of my own. Photographing and spending time with the Basti dwellers was a way to reclaim this city. as my own and rediscover her. And appreciate her in a way I never had, growing up.
But documenting poverty, I soon realized was not so simple.
My relationship with the people of the Basti and The Girls’ , the young daughters in particular is a relationship that was born out of an innocence and naivety that has perhaps become my biggest boon in a photographic world that abounds with thoughtlessness. Because it all happened at a time I was very unaware of the going ons of the photographic. world.
Over and over I have asked myself this— who am I? What is my agenda?
I did have one, at first, although it sounds rather simplistic now. I wanted to take their photographs because I was trying to recreate a story and that made me happy. I liked to give them prints because it made them happy which in turn made me happier. Because even charity is an act of self-centeredness.
In recent months a famous image keeps coming to mind— you must all remember this—that of a man who had fallen onto the tracks of a New York subway. You can’t see his face in this famous image, recorded moments before his death, but I think you can see his hand—or perhaps my imagination is building up its own momentum now—and the steady, bright light of an oncoming train through the dark tunnel. There was an uproar when this image was published, I think by the New York Post. The station was empty, or nearly so. Yet, this photographer had chosen, instead of helping the man get up to safety, to photograph him instead.
Photography, as a visual medium, could have been that universal language that brings everything. together. That’s what makes photography not common, but in fact more powerful. How to use that universal tool?
But ironically I find, that it separates the photographer from the world even more. The camera acts as a buffer between a person and the world and also creates a situation where we just don’t interact with the world anymore. We’re too busy recording their lives for social media to actually be in that life.
This has been my biggest problem, or rather, hurdle, in understanding this world: this. huge rush to get a project done , so much so that you forget a lot of things— all the things that should be important—dignity, respect, understanding. It just puzzles me how much effort it takes for someone to just be human.
