Peripheral Vision

New Directions, New Worlds...

2012-01-23T04:51:00.000+05:30

As most of my close friends and colleagues know, in early 2011 I began to take concrete steps towards embarking on a career in interaction design (IxD). In August of that year I was super fortunate to be accepted into the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design's (CIID) ’12 IDP program. Later in the year, I had the opportunity to spend two months at Spike Island in Bristol as the Charles Wallace India Trust's artist/researcher in residence, where I used my time to begin cursory research on the current state and trajectory of critical and speculative (interaction) design.

A couple of weeks back, I arrived in Copenhagen to embark on what promises to be an extremely challenging, fun-filled and life-changing year at CIID. Although it is hard to narrow down what exactly leads me to IxD, it perhaps the combination of the desire to participate in the shaping of the near-future, an eagerness to develop a critical artistic and professional design practice (inspired by speculative science fiction, social theory and user-centered design) and a keen interest in human-technology relationships

It's heartening to know that at CIID they encourage a multi-disciplinary atmosphere, where my skills in image-making (photo,video) as well as my social science background could be put to use in what Bill Verplank in a lecture last week called, without a hint of jest, “designing the future.” No pressure, right?

CIID ’12 Group Picture

So, Peripheral Vision will take a slight detour with me as I head down the rabbit-hole that 2012 is going to be. My plan for the blog this year is to take stock of what we have learned in the course on a bi-weekly basis, begin to share some thoughts on IxD (some of which I began compiling late last year while at Spike) and also to begin sharing early research on a project that aims to look at speculative and critical science fiction as a source for gaining insights on “designing the future.”

Join me!

14 Proper Nouns

2011-10-18T22:03:00.002+05:30

Here's an ad I made earlier in the month that appeared in Frieze magazine for the upcoming “14 Proper Nouns” discussion between the artist Hassan Khan and curator Nida Ghouse, who is a DELFINA/FICA curatorial/research fellow. The discussions will revisit Khan's “17 and in AUC” work.

The event (?) begins from the 21st October to 3rd November at The Delfina Foundation in London. Promises to be a fun event, be there!

This is Not Fryslân

2011-08-04T00:09:00.004+05:30

A sneak peek at some images from last year's commissioned residency in Fryslân, a northern Dutch province. The project, curated by Feico Hoekstra, invited 6 photographers to explore the province for a month from an “outsider's perspective”. The other photographers invited were Martin Cregg, Derek Henderson, Anna Kahn, Lisa Robinson and Bukkie Dos Santos.

It was quite challenging and a completely different experience for me as I am so used to being in India when I make pictures and work on projects. That said, being thrown into unfamiliar territories forces you to really think about what it means to photograph and re-present a place, familiar or unfamiliar. The series became an exercise in thinking about constructed representations and the identity of a place on the one hand, and the intermingling of value—cultural, economic, personal and representational—on the other. The images below are an introduction to the project. When the new website launches (in a few weeks, fingers crossed), I will upload the entire series with a project note.

“Of Blind Men and Elephants Show” in Dubai

2011-06-29T14:15:00.006+05:30

The Cinemas Project is part of a group show that is on at the The Empty Quarter Gallery in Dubai. The show is curated by the ever-awesome Hester Keijser (one half of Keijser & Beierle and of Mrs. Deane blog fame) and features the works of Mahesh Shantaram, Priya Kambli, Michael Bühler-Rose, Neil Chowdhury, Vidisha Saini and myself.

The show is on from June 14 - July 31, 2011 so please check it out if you happen to be in Dubai!

Here is an excerpt from the exhibition note:

Anyone attempting to offer a comprehensive survey of contemporary Indian photography will soon resemble the mythical blind men who were unable to comprehend the entire form of the elephant. The vast Indian subcontinent simply defies an all-embracing view, and can only be celebrated in its dazzling, kaleidoscopic plurality of visions.

Like the blind men, who ultimately rely on communicating to one another their tales of the same beast if they ever want to arrive at any kind of insight, so do we rely on the many stories told of India by the photographers in this group show. Each of them offers the viewer an intuition of the mutable, living entity that is India, a country and culture that exists most of all in our imagination.

To see some images fromt he show, click here. Press release here. A review here. A short note by the curator here.

Here is a small selection of my images featured in the show:

“This Is Not That” show

2011-05-28T16:52:00.000+05:30

If anyone happens to be in Paris, we have a group show of ten photographers from India being hosted by the Duboys Gallery till the 19th of June.

The show is curated by Dominique Charlet and Fabien Charuau; and the photographers showing their work are Binu Bhaskar, Brijesh Patel, Dhruv Dhawan, Fabien Charuau, Pradeep Dalal, Swapan Parekh, Soham Gupta, Mahesh Shantaram, Neil Chowdhury and myself. I will be showing images from my Cinemas Project series for the first time and it's quite exciting to be part of a show with several photographers whose work I admire and respect.

A friend who visited the gallery last week was nice enough to take a partial installation shot for me...

And here are a few shots from the opening, courtesy the gallery (you can see the whole set here)...

“Nature as Image” show

2011-04-13T23:31:00.001+05:30

Happy to be a part of Subuhi Jiwani's group show “Nature as Image” at The Loft gallery (opening this Friday). I will be showing some images from my stay in Fryslân. Do come if you get the time, it's on for two weeks (April 15-May 3). Other artists showing are Neha Choksi, Priyanka Dasgupta, Munir Kabani and Shambhavi Kaul.

Here is a peek at two of my images from the show...

More work from this series coming soon...

glamdrogynous

2011-03-28T14:46:00.000+05:30

2011-01-04T23:42:00.002+05:30

– = +

Say Nothing

2010-12-19T03:06:00.007+05:30

A poster / cd cover that I made for Mumbai's own Slow Down Clown, a wonderful band fronted by Vitek Goyel. I tried a few versions that didn't really work and then scoured my library for old political pictures and posters for inspiration. Found this one in Kajri Jain's fantastic Gods in the Bazaar, which is a book about India's mass-produced bazaar art that I had read for a class at CSCS.

The image that has been cropped and appropriated is from Indira Gandhi's notorious "Garibi Hatao" campaign, a campaign that helped her sweep into power in the 1971 election. If you look closely, and if you're one those (at times annoying) people who believes that images should always adhere to the conventions of realism, you might quickly notice that the picture falls short in terms of its verisimilitude.

Both the mic and the baby exist in a visual regime that has no intention of adhering to the codes of realism. These babies, often of ambiguous gender and race, were extremely popular in the political iconography of the time. They were projected repeatedly to symbolize the paternalistic and transcendental authority of the incipient secular state. Jain writes of the original poster, which proclaims to us “Garibi Hatao” in both English and in Hindi, "We as viewers are invited to identify with the adoring “masses”, but at the same time, to the extent that we can read the slogan, to distance ourselves from them and identify with the infantile citizenship... made available for us within the realms of a transcendent and patriarchal yet democratic state.”

I appropriated it here, perhaps problematically, but mostly facetiously, as I felt it worked with the album's title “Say Nothing.”

P.S. The font used is Atelier Carvalho Bernau's recently released Jean-Luc typeface.

2010-12-13T23:34:00.001+05:30

Bahahaus

2010-11-30T02:35:00.001+05:30

I've been researching the connections between design (aesthetics), politics and culture lately in relation to some upcoming projects planned for next year. I’m particularly interested in the ways received notions of “design” are intertwined with their cultural contingencies. I'm currently in the “death by hyperlink” phase of my research, where one realizes that there is just so much stuff out there (though not all of it critical enough) that it is time to systematically organise the intake of information or drown in the flood.

If anyone has some interesting readings and links on Indian design and design culture, please send them over either here or by email.

Watch this space. Till then, this little gem found at imprint cracked me up a good deal.

Minimal House?

2010-11-19T17:03:00.000+05:30

From an interview in Cluster with the always fascinating Lebbeus Woods:

"Housing meant ‘mass-housing’ for masses of workers employed on factory assembly lines, originally in the form of ‘company towns.’ Later, housing ‘projects’ were designed and built for masses of lower-income urbanites, an underclass that still exists but is much too diverse to be massed together and in effect ghetto-ized.

Today’s increasingly service-based economy, one fragmented by computers and internet niches, has created a need for an entirely new typology of living quarters and their groupings, one that has yet to be invented and tested."

Flipping the Kart

2010-11-12T00:51:00.001+05:30

To those who’ve “failed”...

2010-11-08T18:41:00.004+05:30

Museums and Collective Memory a talk by Francesca Recchia

2010-10-29T17:48:00.002+05:30

WordPlay

2010-10-24T19:54:00.003+05:30

Oh how I love thee, my VisualThesaurus!

OutDesigned...

2010-10-22T14:44:00.000+05:30

"The accepted function of the designer has become one of providing a service rather than generating ideas to be communicated; this self-definition discourages explicitly political expression."

- Maud Levin, from her book Clean New World: Culture, Politics and Graphic Design.

Long time coming...

2010-09-16T15:12:00.002+05:30

Updates with new work and a website overhaul coming soon!

Two Suns in the Sunset

2010-09-16T02:00:00.005+05:30

I've pulled the above images from a New York Times story on the "atomic cameramen" who filmed and photographed the test detonations of nuclear bombs in the 40s and 50s (before the ban on atmospheric testing was put into place). Many of the image makers died of cancer later in their lives. Image #2 in the above sequence pictures the "V.I.P. observers" of the detonations at one of the viewing decks that were set up by the government. It is also pertinent to note that a lot of the cameras, film stock and lenses used were later sold commercially for use by Hollywood studios; a reminder of how military R&D often trickles down and drives technological change in the entertainment industry.

PUBLIC 40: Screens

2010-09-15T22:46:00.012+05:30

Was invited to make a contribution to the 40th issue of PUBLIC (a journal of 'Art, Culture & Idea's published by the Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts in York University, Toronto) which went by the title: Screens. They featured the auditorium image from Maratha Mandir below. Do check out the journal if you get a chance to, there are some interesting texts and images/artworks that interrogate and investigate the shifting nature of screens themselves as well as their influence in changing—and often conflating—the "public" and "private" spheres.

From the editorial note:

"PUBLIC 40: Screens features twenty artists, curators and researchers who investigate and respond to new spaces of viewing and changing patterns of consumption —from Quebec to Palestine, from streets to galleries— with a variety of aesthetic, technological and distribution tactics. From Kelly Mark’s The Kiss to Elaine Ho and Sean Smith’s project responding to the Beijing Olympics, from Bruno Lessard’s essay about Robert Lepage’s Le Moulin à images to Holly Lewis’s "Wars of Air and Electricity," Screens is dedicated to the ways screens are used, viewed, imagined, placed, and made worldwide."

I was particularly taken by an image from Canadian artist Kelly Mark's installation The Kiss, which I have taken the liberty to copy and paste below.

Kelly Mark, The Kiss (2007)

On her website Kelly writes: "The light source for this work was created by simply recording the cast light of a gang bang scene in a hard core porn film as it bathed my apartment wall while viewing. No image or sound was captured only the reflected light. The porn genre tends to be fairly routine and pragmatic in terms of editing, therefore the resulting glow is steady and rhythmic with few camera changes but with quickening pulses of colour...mainly pinks, oranges and red hues."

I really love it.

It's one of those images where I'm sure that you don't really need the text at all, the caption itself, being so evocative, does a lot of the work. And yet, some people would like to know this. The artist herself clearly believes that it is important to know this. It is always interesting to think about just how 'context', such as the kind Kelly has provided, changes the way you read and experience an image. Personally, I constantly battle with myself as to whether it is necessary to put contextual information beside a particular image, because sometimes context can override the subjective reaction a viewer has with the image; and yet, often it is so important to know why/where/whom/what/how.

It's also perhaps worth thinking about titles/captions that reference other titles/cations and how artists can use that to not merely reference but 'update' images to their cultural time and place. With regards to Kelly Mark's work, Gustav Klimt's The Kiss comes to mind:

Gustav Klimt, The Kiss (1908)

Ah, convergences.

Hanif

2010-07-15T23:36:00.003+05:30

Dematerializing Walter...

2010-07-11T20:38:00.003+05:30

2010-07-09T23:02:00.000+05:30

“Underneath the large noisy events lie the small events of silence.” - Gilles Deleuze

What I Believe - J.G. Ballard

2010-06-15T10:55:00.001+05:30

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon's knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.

I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.

I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.

Excerpts from J.G. Ballard's prose-poem prayer 'What I Believe'. Read the entire thing here.

Shower Power

2010-06-10T18:50:00.001+05:30

The ruse nonpareil of power is to put together a people who feel the need to believe in it.

Beanbags [ Bombay | Mumbai ]

2010-06-05T19:34:00.013+05:30

Words: Matthew Parker | Images: Zubin Pastakia

"Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer.” - Michel De Certeau

Mumbai can drive you crazy. And because (or, perhaps, despite) of this, you want to make sense of it. You want to make some kind of order out of it. And more often than not, in trying to create order, you succumb to the same thing that almost everyone succumbs to, the same trap: you fall for the idea of the “Maximum City”, the chaos, the speed, the heat, the shit, the poor, the rich, all at once, the grand narrative of 17 million people forced to live on top of one another in a city held together by ingenuity, momentum and sheer force of will. You succumb to this because it’s true, to a degree, and because it’s intoxicating, and also because it’s easy. In the overwhelming face of everything it’s easy to say, “all life is here, it’s messy, and it works!” and turn a blind eye to everything else. But it gets kind of boring. And it means that other interpretations are lost.

If you’ve lived or worked in Mumbai in the last five or ten years you’ll have seen the beanbag graffiti: Beanbags 26407383. I saw it once and then, like a new word you learn, I saw it everywhere, on walls, houses, pipelines, metal sheets, flyovers, construction sites, waste-ground. Everywhere: Beanbags 26407383. It was, it is, the work of a beanbag salesman, who had the genius to go out and spray the city with the name of his product and a phone number, at one stroke bypassing the legal, unaffordable marketing mechanisms of the ‘official’ city springing up around him. In the city of commerce, the very fabric of the city became an advertising hoarding. And this is how he made his fortune.

It’s a nice story, but we were interested in something else too. We were interested in the opportunity the repeated motif provided us to look at the city with different eyes, in a different light, away from the “Maximum” view.

We followed the graffiti from south to north, from the southern peninsular tip, the very oldest of old Bombay, up north through the manufacturing heartland, up into the new suburbs and then further, further north and east, out to where Mumbai spreads and falters into nothingness, becoming mainland India. Two stories came out of this. The first, more prosaic but no less important, is the Mumbai of specifics, of facts and dates and figures. Living behind and within the graffiti are the details: the moss covered walls of the long dead United Mills reminding us of the city’s industrial past; the Sea Link, connecting two congested pieces of land, providing us with an immense symbol of "progress" with an equally immense cost (Rs 1600 Crore). Further north, the Bandra-Kurla Complex, a riposte to the mills, with its plastic 21st century fantasy of corporate Mumbai, sitting metaphorically and literally on the shaky foundations of the river Mithi, a natural drain for the city’s rainwater, which has been dangerously filled and narrowed to construct this financial dream zone. We get other details too: the pipes, carrying water, slowly running dry; the new luxury tower blocks in the far north, half finished, painfully and proudly devoid of history; a dirt road with a blue fence on the edge of town, leading us to a ruined fort that is older than everything that comes before. These are the details that are forgotten in the big noise and this is the first story.

What of the second? The second is something entirely different, entirely personal and unexpected. It’s a Mumbai that I try to speak of to others but find I have no voice for. The city, through these images, is one that is soaked with silence and longing. It is curiously emptied of people, evoking a loneliness I feel but rarely see. I still don’t know where it comes from. Partly it comes from the photographer’s eye. Curiously, I recognise these people and things in the images, and I recognise myself in them too. The man standing on the sea wall, the girl looking out onto the train tracks, the lovers who scribble their names under the flyover… I recognise them. Not personally, not individually, but as types that I see passing through every day, locked in my own private thoughts, as they seem to be theirs.

[The project has been featured in Mumbai Boss and MISC Magazine.]

[Click on the images for larger previews]

Cinemas Project in MARG

2010-05-27T19:35:00.005+05:30

The Cinemas Project was featured in the March edition of Marg magazine, the theme of which is Indian Cinema. Many, many thanks to Erika Balsom, who has written the perfect text given the constraints of space in such a format.

Auditorium, Capitol Cinema, Mumbai

See if you get a chance to purchase the issue, which is titled "Being Here, Now: Insights into Indian Cinema." Shanay Jhaveri, whose new book "Outsider Films on India 1950-1990" has just been published, has done a wonderful job of guest editing this issue. Some of the other artists/practitioners/researchers/writers featured in the magazine are Ashim Ahluwalia, Shirely Abraham, Moinak Biswas, Kaushik Bhaumik, Raqs Media Collective, Rachel Dwyer, Shumona Goel and Dale Cannedy Azim, Amar Kanwar, Amit Madheshiya, Benjamin Mercer and Kaunteya Shah.

Rukawat ke liye khed hai

2010-05-27T14:33:00.001+05:30

Image-Text

2010-05-19T18:25:00.004+05:30

It's sometimes funny how just one word can play sweet havoc with an image. More here.

Shootdown in Gorai

2010-05-18T01:03:00.003+05:30

Sul (left) vs Zub (right), just off the Gorai dumping ground, one very early morning in 2009. Almost as good as this legendary stand-off.

Thinking is feeling is thinking is feeling...

2010-05-16T19:09:00.002+05:30

...and perhaps losing your mind is to come to your senses.

2010-05-15T13:09:00.005+05:30

2010-05-15T01:39:00.004+05:30

The Archaeology of Absence

2010-05-13T21:11:00.007+05:30

I am very, very excited to present a very brief selection from Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya's series, The Archaeology of Absence, which is part of their Through a Lens Darkly project. If you're not already aware of the work that Madhu and Manas are collaborating on that explores and reflects on the abandoned National Instruments factory in Kolkatta, please head over to their blog Through a Lens Darkly and take a look it and read what they have to say.

All images © Madhuban Mitra & Manas Bhattacharya

As you can see, this modern ruin is an extremely generative one and Manas and Madhu's 'documentation' of the inner contours of the factory is as impressive and extensive as it is sensitive to the many possibilities and secrets that it conceals within it. So extensive, in fact, that the two have begun breaking down the project into several self-contained, though interconnected, series. There are some haunting animation loops on their blog as well. I am very interested in the different ways in which they will choose to articulate and unfold this project over the next year or so.

Also, they are currently showing the work at the Thessaloniki Photobiennale 2010 in Greece. The show opened on May 1st and will be on view for a full three months till July 31, 2010. More details here. Do go if you can make it!

ALSO, look forward to an informal conversation the three of us will be having sometime soon on Peripheral Vision/Through a Lens Darkly on the process of image-making, phenomenology, aesthetics, (con)text, ambiguity, the possibilities of ruins, nostalgia... and more.

2010-05-13T01:22:00.000+05:30

Envoi

Imprisoned by four walls
(to the North, the crystal of non-knowledge
a landscape to be invented
to the South, reflective memory
to the East, the mirror
to the West, stone and the song of silence)
I wrote messages, but received no reply.

- Octavio Paz

Dis Poetry

2010-05-12T22:21:00.000+05:30

Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops
De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots
Dis poetry is designed fe rantin
Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,
Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep
Preaching follow me
Like yu is blind sheep,
Dis poetry is not Party Political
Not designed fe dose who are critical.
Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed
It gets into me dreadlocks
It lingers around me head
Dis poetry goes wid me as I pedal me bike
I've tried Shakespeare, respect due dere
But did is de stuff I like.

Dis poetry is not afraid of going ina book
Still dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look
Dis poetry is Verbal Riddim, no big words involved
An if I hav a problem de riddim gets it solved,
Iove tried to be more romantic, it does nu good for me
So I tek a Reggae Riddim an build me poetry,
I could try be more personal
But you've heard it all before,
Pages of written words not needed
Brain has many words in store,
Yu could call dis poetry Dub Ranting
De tongue plays a beat
De body starts skanking,
Dis poetry is quick an childish
Dis poetry is fe de wise an foolish,
Anybody can do it fe free,
Dis poetry is fe yu an me,
Don't stretch yu imagination
Dis poetry is fe de good of de Nation,
Chant,
In de morning
I chant
In de night
I chant
In de darkness
An under de spotlight,
I pass thru University
I pass thru Sociology
An den I got a dread degree
In Dreadfull Ghettology.

Dis poetry stays wid me when I run or walk
An when I am talking to meself in poetry I talk,
Dis poetry is wid me,
Below me an above,
Dis poetry's from inside me
It goes to yu
WID LUV.

- Benjamin Zephaniah

Thanks to my friend Judith for sending this over. Judith makes the most amazing orange cake with raisins (there is a trick to get the raisins incredibly succulent: slice them up and soak them in the orange).

Field of the Visible

2010-05-12T12:49:00.000+05:30

"... the whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable."

- Jean-Louis Comolli

2010-05-09T19:14:00.005+05:30

From hence I come to here we go...

Touch

2010-05-09T18:27:00.001+05:30

"The taste of the apple... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading."
- Jorge Luis Borges

Slicing up Buñuel...

2010-05-05T17:41:00.005+05:30

A vow

2010-05-05T16:31:00.001+05:30

I solemnly swear never to follow the narrative you assign to me.

2010-05-04T21:36:00.000+05:30

2010-05-04T21:33:00.006+05:30

Beanbags

2010-05-03T12:28:00.004+05:30

Beanbags [Bombay | Mumbai] finally sees the light of day at Mumbaiboss and at MISC Magazine. Thanks are owed to Matthew Parker for writing the text and for all the support. See the complete cut here.

Join us as we follow the graffiti around the city as it bypasses the mechanisms of (and yet co-exists with) the "official" city of business complexes, large infrastructure projects and luxury high-rise complexes. Matt's text will take you elsewhere as well...

A big thank you to all my friends who accompanied me on these crazy trips. You know who you are.

Airoots!

2010-04-29T01:43:00.005+05:30

Matias and Rahul push it one step further on Airoots (one of my favourite blogs), questioning the informal-formal conceptual binary when describing and thinking about spaces such as Dharavi.

"We feel that the word ‘informal’ has now become another catchword that can be affixed to all kinds of terms to give them a superficial edge: informal settlements, informal networks, informal cities, informal design. The term has not been adequately thought through and glosses over many dimensions of lived reality.

If we want to describe the cities of today, especially the parts that fall out of the grid or creep through it, we need to invent new terms that express not so much their form but rather the way they evolve. That is why we would rather describe MG Road as being constantly ‘in-formation’ rather than informal.

Saying that a habitat is ‘in-formation’ doesn’t necessarily mean that it is incomplete. Instead, the term echoes Kevin Lynch’s description of cities as “evolving learning ecologies” (1981 p.115) and seeks to capture the capacity of certain urban spaces to evolve continuously and adapt to the context. The hyphen between ‘in and ‘formation’ is there to emphasize the dynamic production of urban forms and its perpetual incremental improvement and conservation."

This is something I have been thinking about too of late. How do we think about the non "rational" / "official" city (that "grid of discipline"), without resorting to a binary opposition and yet account for difference? One way is to not think of this other city as a "lack" or somewhere prior on an imagined time-line. So, non-capitalist not pre-capitalist economies. Or a-modern medicine not "traditional" medicine. And, further, the purity of such categories is always questionable. Conceptual and everyday borders are constantly transgressed. Which is why I like Airoots' "in-formation" habitats. It doesn't foreclose different directions and possibilities.

But, I do sometimes wonder if we are beginning to privilege the economic (Dharavi is always celebrated for being economically vibrant) over the cultural and social. I wonder what the implications of that may be for cultural spaces that are not so economically/commercially as vibrant?

On Certainty...

2010-04-28T19:41:00.001+05:30

Jim Ballard the cyborg keeps me happy as I vacillate. Can't believe it's been a year; I'm still in mourning...

On the Folly of Exactitude...

2010-04-20T23:58:00.004+05:30

Kill Descartes

2010-04-17T13:38:00.001+05:30

"At first, it appeared simple: to gain an overview of Paris, one needs to find a suitable viewpoint. But where from? The top of the Montparnasse tower? No – the crowds there would distract. The top of Montmartre (where one would have the advantage of not seeing the Basilica Sacré Coeur)? Perhaps, but the view would be too oblique there. Maybe a satellite photograph? But then only one plan would be obtained . . . The balcony of the office of the Mayor of Paris, in the Hotel de Ville? An empty and cold place, surrounded by ugly fountains: one would see nothing of the vitality of the metropolis. So, is it impossible to comprehend the city? Not if we keep moving! Let us circulate, and then, suddenly, Paris will become gradually visible."

- Latour and Hermant

Le Monde Magazine Shoot

2010-04-13T23:49:00.016+05:30

Some outtakes of Chor Bazaar from an editorial shoot I did for Le Monde in March.

Certain Indian magazines really need a lesson in "how-to-treat-your-photographer-both-as-a-human-being-and-as-a-professional" from them. Also, foreign publications have this wonderful habit of actually paying their photographers on time and not six months after the shoot.

Ghosts, Futures

2010-04-12T21:25:00.001+05:30

"...the debris of shipwrecked histories still today raise up the ruins of an unknown, strange city. They burst forward within the modernist, massive, homogenous city like slips of the tongue from an unknown, perhaps unconscious, language. They surprise."

- Michel de Certeau, from Ghosts in the City

Surfaces

2010-04-12T16:59:00.000+05:30

The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental substance of an epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other reciprocally

- Siegfried Kracauer

Mekas

2010-04-07T22:39:00.002+05:30

"I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the clean lights. I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs. In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily tailor to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history. I am for art which we do for each other, as friends.

- Jonas Mekas

Benjamin

2010-03-27T01:14:00.001+05:30

"In thousands of eyes, in thousands of objects, the city is reflected."

- Walter Benjamin

Yavatmal-Amravati Road

2010-03-26T02:43:00.001+05:30

Wadala, Mumbai

2010-03-26T02:12:00.006+05:30

Himachal

2010-03-25T22:38:00.009+05:30

Northern travels... Memories of cold rooms and two hot parathas.

Science / Fiction

2010-03-13T06:01:00.000+05:30

More de Certeau:

“There can only be a science of science-fiction.”

Michel de Certeau and the presence of absence

2010-03-13T05:52:00.001+05:30

Was it fate? I remember the marvelous Shelburne Museum in Vermontwhere, in thirty-five houses of a reconstructed village, all the signs, tools and products of nineteenth-century everyday life teem; everything, from cooking utensils and pharmaceutical goods to weaving instruments, toilet articles, and children’s toys can be found in profusion. The display includes innumerable familiar objects, polished, deformed, or made more beautiful by long use; everywhere there are as well the marks of the active hands and laboring or patient bodies for which these things composed the daily circuits, the fascinating presence of absences whose traces were everywhere. At least this village full of abandoned and salvaged objects drew one’s attention, through them, to the ordered murmurs of a hundred past or possible villages, and by means of these imbricated traces one began to dream of countless combinations of existences.

- Michel de Certeau

Memorable passage from The Practice of Everyday Life.

After Auschwitz...

2010-03-07T17:15:00.003+05:30

"After Auschwitz, history is no longer a rational unfolding. The summit of reason, order, administration, is also the summit of terror. Calculation and accounting encounter the mathematical sublime of railway timetables and of genocide at the same time."

- Bill Readings (on Adorno's "After Auschwitz")

Cinema City Goes to Berlin

2010-02-09T20:15:00.002+05:30

Happy to be part of Madhushree Datta's paltan that is heading to the Berlinale this year.

If anyone finds themselves in Berlin from the 11th to the 21st of February, please go checkout "Cinema City", which is a group show that Madhu has curated.

"Cinema City is a project to document, archive and re-read the cinema producing cities through images and narratives within cinema and its impacts and manifestations in the lived world; involving inter-disciplinary and collaborative research, pedagogy and art and media productions."

The Cinemas Project will be featured as an installation at the Delphi Filmpalastam. Amruta Sakalkar has designed a lovely little two-seater cinema hall in which the images will be presented. Thanks to Madhu, Kausik and the folks at KRVIA and Majlis for putting it all together.

Here is a list of the people that are exhibiting/screening their work:

The Western Suburb: Installation on Sweatshops of Cinema (Avijit
Mukul Kishore, Mamta Murthy, Rikhav Desai & Found Footage
Archive of Majlis); Cinema City Lived: Book of Spatial and Textual
Cartography (Design Cell, KRVIA; Text: Hansa Thapliyal, Design:
Ankit Bhargav); Phantom Lady on Light Boxes: Performance Photography
(Pushpamala N); The Cinemas Project: Photo Art on Single
Screen Cinemas (Zubin Pastakia, Design: Amruta Sakalkar); Bioscope:
Cinema-City-Modernity Dateline (Kausik Mukhopadhyay);
Calendar Gala: Iconography in 20th Century (Art Works by Multiple
Artists, Research: Shikha Pandey); Pila House: Interactive Computer
Archive (Rohan Shivkumar and Design Cell, KRVIA; Software Design:
Thatzit)

Films:
Certified Universal (Avijit Mukul Kishore, India 2009, SD, 15’); Dark
Room (Renu Savant, India 2009, SD, 10’); Have You Dreamt Cinema?
(Hansa Thapliyal, India 2009, SD, 16’); Sin City (Srikant Agawane,
India 2009, SD, 16’)

Visual Designer Cinema City: Kausik Muklhopadhyay

Creative Director and Curator Cinema City: Madhusree Dutta

2010-01-28T03:41:00.003+05:30

''Have patience, and I'll make halvah for you from unripe grapes.''

- Persian proverb

2010-01-26T02:09:00.005+05:30

A Theory of the Real

2010-01-16T01:23:00.012+05:30

Memento from a mind-bending class on the philosophy of science at CSCS, Bangalore. Definitely one of the better courses I have taken to date.

One of the discoveries was the work of Donna Haraway. In her book Primate Visions, among many, many other things she successfully makes the case that the natural sciences much like the human sciences are inextricably within the processes that give them birth. And so, like the human sciences, the natural sciences are culturally and historically specific, modified, involved.

Here is a nice quote that stayed with me from the introduction:

Both fiction and fact are rooted in an epistemology that appeals to experience. However, there is an important difference; the word fiction is an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning, while fact is a descendent of a past participle, a word form which masks the generative deed or performance. A fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded; fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings.

Lift Kara De

2010-01-14T15:01:00.006+05:30

I took the above images with my cellular phone while waiting for the elevator on my way up to a friend's place in Bombay. Every now and then it is worth reminding ourselves of just how naturalised spatial segregation is in our everyday world. Both, how we cut up and divide space and the justifications that we provide for the same, are, no doubt, a certain kind of politics.

Check out Hiland Sapphire, a luxury building project of the United Credit Belani group in Calcutta. The self-proclaimed "residence of choice for the manor born" lists on its website the characteristic features of the complex: Set in an "idyllic landscape" lined with foliage and fountains, the apartments have "capacious rooms of the bygone British era" fitted with "airy French windows". Further, the complex comes with a fully equipped "top-notch surveillance" system because "security, these days, has become an issue of foremost concern". All this is, of course, put together according to our very own "Vastu principles".

In case those gorgeous renderings haven't convinced you and you're still in two minds, there's more good news: your domestic help will not get in the way of your European manor dreams. I quote from an earlier version of their web-site (which has since been removed, but shows up in Google's cache memory when searched.):

Separate living quarters, toilets and washrooms will be provided for all domestic help employed by residents. Moreover, to render them 'invisible', segregated entrances and elevators have been constructed.

Whoever said Utopia was a place that could never exist? For the Great Indian Middle-Class Imagination Machine, it is very much here.

(Hat tip to Immanuel's Cant for the title of this post)

B's

2010-01-14T13:43:00.001+05:30

What is it with the letter B?

Borges, Ballard, Berger, Baudrillard, Barthes, Benjamin, Burroughs, Brakhage, Bradbury, Bergess, Balagangadhara, Bourdieu, Bauman...

Lens Culture

2010-01-13T15:23:00.007+05:30

So glad that The Cinemas Project is featured in the latest volume of Lens Culture.

From their website:

Discover new photography from China, Australia, Cuba, India, the US, Canada, England, South Korea, and Brazil. This volume also includes new photobook reviews, a great video interview with UK photographer Simon Roberts, and more. So, settle in with a cup of good coffee, put your feet up, and enjoy!

(Remember to hit the "slideshow" button for larger images in all the series)

Quote of the day...

2010-01-09T18:40:00.001+05:30

"Buildings hold purposes, ruins hold questions and secrets."

From the wonderful blog Welcome to the Interdrome.

Because You Care

2010-01-07T15:41:00.007+05:30

For the bleeding hearts... How (not) to write about Africa by Binyavanga Wainaina.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Read the entire text at Granta online.

2009-12-25T18:23:00.016+05:30

ET Interview

2009-12-25T16:23:00.012+05:30

The Economic Times featured the Cinemas Project last weekend and did a little Q&A session with me. The web version seems unedited and has a few errors (NB: I wouldn't call myself an NYU alumnus; and it is a "knotted relationality" not "knotted rationality" between past and present ).

Check it out here if you're interested.

Traces

2009-12-06T12:53:00.001+05:30

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

2009-11-05T13:44:00.015+05:30

"The “bricoleur”[’s]. . . universe of instruments is closed and therules of his game are always to make do with “whatever is at hand.” . . . Further, the “bricoleur” also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he “speaks” not only with things, as we have already seen, but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities. The “bricoleur” may not ever complete his purpose but he always puts something of himself into it."

—Claude Lévi-Strauss

Portraits

2009-11-03T22:13:00.002+05:30

Some portraits from earlier this year for a Tehelka editorial...

Sooni, 2009

Kiran, 2009

Kalki, 2009

Processing...

2009-10-28T21:46:00.002+05:30

Lens Culture Awards

2009-10-16T23:02:00.012+05:30

The results of the first annual Lens Culture International Exposure Awards were just announced.

For about four years now, Lens Culture has been an invaluable repository of international photography as well as a resource for insightful essays, interviews and analysis.

I was quite happy to be one of the 25 photographers who received an "Honorable Mention Award" (in the portfolio category) on their website. I had sent in a selection from the Cinemas Project series.

You can find the other photographers that are featured (and links to their websites) here.

Hue-ristics

2009-10-13T11:05:00.004+05:30

(From xkcd)

Tiffinbox

2009-09-26T13:01:00.007+05:30

Honoured to be featured on Seshu's Tiffinbox. Seshu is a photographer, blogger and tweeter nonpareil.

If you're looking for a wedding photographer in the United States, check out Seshu's work on his website.

Cinema Halls Update

2009-09-24T11:37:00.014+05:30

I have updated the Cinemas Project page on the website with images made in the last year and a half. Do take a look.

I've been photographing cinema halls in Bombay/Mumbai for about 3 years now. As always, feedback, comments and questions are welcomed.

A small selection below:

On the Tube...

2009-04-03T01:49:00.003+05:30

And now, for a few words by Aldous Huxley on power, propaganda and politics...

"That we do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

[5x8 ] Show in Bangalore

2009-03-27T00:47:00.006+05:30

© Zubin Pastakia, 2007

The [5x8] group show makes its last stop in Bangalore at the Tasveer gallery from the 27th March to the 14th of April. The other photographers showing their work are: Mahesh Shantaram, Rajib De, Sudharak Olwe and Vinay Mahidar.

Check it out if you are in Bangalore at the time and bring your friends and family.

IFA Show in Bangalore

2009-03-25T23:26:00.003+05:30

Mathuradas Estate, Colaba, Mumbai © Zubin Pastakia 2007

The above print will be exhibited at "The Big Picture", a show being held in Bangalore to raise funds for the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) on April 5-8 at the WelcomArt Gallery (ITC Windsor) and at Gallery Sumukha from April 10-15. Check out the site to view the other artists that are showing.

Schadenfreude

2009-03-22T23:15:00.004+05:30

Rohit Chopra, of the wonderful blog Anti-History/In Another life, comments on reality television:

In general, I don't enjoy reality shows that revolve around some kind of contest, even if some can be watchable. To me, the competitive reality show subgenre seems based on the principles of humiliation and hierarchy. A group of experts evaluate, often in unqualifiedly obnoxious mode, a group of people clearly placed lower than them on a scale of achievement designed by television network executives. The contestants are expected to show deference to the authority of the experts. As time progresses, whether they win or lose, the contestants are meant to demonstrate gratitude for what they have learnt, and share, often misty-eyed, how they have shed their immature selves, like snakes after moulting.

Competition-based reality shows also reek of a get-rich-quick, gaming-the-system kind of air. And the shows are presented to viewers in an ambivalent tone that simultaneously celebrates and reviles the baseness of human nature. We are asked to witness how the lure of money or fame will compel humans to backstab each other, sabotage their colleagues' opportunities, and scheme to emerge victorious from a labryinth of intrigue. What such shows present--aside from any particular competition- is the principle of competition itself. And that too, at its very ugliest.

The Participatory Panopticon

2009-03-08T21:39:00.006+05:30

Jamais Cascio on the inevitable rise of what he calls The Participatory Panopticon:

Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves.

This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily.

I call this world the Participatory Panopticon.

As the folks at Remixing Anthropology point out, amongst other things, this raises important ethical questions about image making in the digital age.

Fieldwork

2009-03-06T18:34:00.010+05:30

Editorial Work: Beanbag Graffiti in Bombay

2008-11-20T19:51:00.024+05:30

Please go HERE to see the final cut and text.

Every move you make...

2008-08-28T23:17:00.010+05:30

The above strip is from Boy on a Stick and Slither.

Reminds me of a conversation in J.G. Ballard's novel Super-Cannes:

"People are so immersed in their work they wouldn't recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There's no civic sense here."

"There is." Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. "Think of it as a new kind of togetherness."

Love and Photography (not Rockets)

2008-07-07T22:39:00.032+05:30

I am glad I came across Madi Ju and Patrick Tsai's online project "My Little Dead Dick". The collection of images, which serve as a visual diary of the two photographers' brief relationship, is a powerful reminder of how evocative the photographic narrative can be.

By isolating some very beautiful, personal moments of their lives, Madi and Patrick (who have since separated) let us in on a private narrative that seamlessly slides from personal documentary to fiction and back again. The loose, snapshot aesthetic keeps it fresh and I found myself clicking through the entire project in one sitting effortlessly.

It reminded me of how effectively appearances can cohere. Photography and memory work together in curious, circuitous ways -- constantly referencing each other. While viewing their little love diary, it is hard not to be reminded of one's own life; of love past and pending.

Do check out the personal work both have done since.

He wants YOU...

2008-06-13T11:21:00.019+05:30

...to join his side for the perpetual war. Nobody today remembers the reason for fighting it and no side has actually won.

Interested?

I just stumbled across Chet Zar's work recently via io9 and somehow it had me thinking about the war. His "Ugly American" series, is being exhibited at the Strychnin Gallery in London. The images, which are unabashedly lowbrow, are an equal dose of horror and political commentary. I quite liked some of it.

The work reminds me of Gerald Scarfe's apocalyptic animation in The Wall, which haunted me when I first saw it as a kid. It still scares the shit out of me, and yet, leads me to contemplate on the futility of the perpetual war(s):

In 2002, George W. Bush said:

"I want to thank the choir for coming, the youngsters for being here. I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace. We want there to be peace. We want people to live in peace all around the world."

In 1981, Phillip K. Dick (read this also) wrote,

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

My Portfolio Website

2008-05-05T01:17:00.009+05:30

My photography portfolio website is finally up and running.

Please visit: http://www.zubinpastakia.com (if the link from blogger doesn't take you there just type out the address)

Many, many thanks to Varun Gupta at Morphus Designs.

© Zubin Pastakia 2008

Lawrence Weschler's Convergences

2008-05-03T01:36:00.019+05:30

I’ve been reading Lawrence Weschler’s “Everything That Rises: A Book on Convergences”, which is a fascinating rumination on the associations between images, through time and geography. In the introduction, Weschler playfully asks us to "make what we will" of these “uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places.”

To site one such intriguing convergence: in a chapter titled "Expressions of an Absolute: Pollock/Galaxies/Rothko/Moon" Weschler draws a powerful–and not merely compositional, but almost metaphysical–parallel between looking at a Rothko painting made in 1969,

and at a picture from the moon landing from the summer of 1969,

About the Rothko, Weschler writes:

"...the canvas poised neatly between self-possession and self-divulgence: it draws you out and gives Nothing back. Its presence, like that of a black hole, is of such density that you might lose your Self there... There is a moment in looking at those paintings when we stop looking at them and they start looking at us--at, and if we are not careful, if there is not enough of us there, straight through us."

And about the moon landing picture:

"A Giant Leap for Mankind? Godlike, unprecedented, Man had vaulted forth into the heavens, a mammoth enterprise, a stunning achievement: a man on the moon. And yet on the moon, there was nothing there (what-in-God's-name-else had we been expecting?). A vast interminable emptiness: a howling, airless silence. A vacuum of meaning: absolute solitude."

I don't think I've ever read it put better than that. An illustration of Camus' famous line: "The absurd of life is born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the universe." Art, most good art, demands equally that the viewer or reader of the work step up to the challenge and infuse meaning to the work in front of him, just as one attempts to (every now and then, mostly in vain) search for meaning in life. Often, we have to create our own meaning, and if nothing else: at least attempt to engage. That failing, we perhaps should just take delight in the absurdity of it all.

What is brilliant about the book is that though most of the convergences start with common compositional motifs (the horizon lines and colour contrasts in the above two images), Weschler rarely gets redundant on you with his convergences. Drawing parallels between Joel Meyerowitz's pictures of "Ground Zero" and the landscape paintings of Vermeer and Caspar David Friedrich; landscapes and bodyscapes; the photograph of the dead Che and a Rembrandt painting, (hat-tip to John Berger, my favourite); the mapping of the internet and the human brain... I could go on.

This book is essential.

If you can't find it in stores, check out the site, its fantastic as well.

Quote:

2008-04-26T02:10:00.001+05:30

Rothko:

"There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing."

Imaginal Disc: Science & Film

2008-04-25T18:17:00.007+05:30

Don't miss what Alexis Gambis is doing over at Imaginal Disc: Science and Film Productions... From the website:

"Imaginal Disc Productions is a film and video production company which specializes in the making of films around, with and about science/scientists. The objective is to break the stereotypes of the “scientists”, initiate scientists to the process of science film-making and show the creative aspect of woman and men scientists at the bench."

Check out his little 16mm gem Dr. Funque and His Petri Dish. Wonderful "small form" cinema that Jonas Mekas celebrated in his Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto.

Inspiring.

The Built Landscape

2007-11-14T01:44:00.008+05:30

The following project is a work in progress and is being partly supported by a photography fellowship from The India Habitat Centre.

Please visit the project page on my portfolio site to view all the images from the project so far:

© Zubin Pastakia 2007

© Zubin Pastakia 2007

© Zubin Pastakia 2007

© Zubin Pastakia 2007

Decisive Moments & Biographical Moments

2007-11-13T20:04:00.003+05:30

I have been posting to the SARAI Reader-List thoughts that have occurred to me about photography during the process of making the cinema hall project. I have selected some of these thoughts and posted them below in the hope that it will encourage some sort of dialog about the making and viewing of images.

Photographing, for me, is both an analytical and an emotional activity. I tend to think of my work as visual research; and when I am photographing I am collecting visual data. In my current projects I have certain concerns, questions and ideas that I am trying to communicate that do not require me to shoot "decisive moments" at tiny fractions of a second. John Berger wrote about this in his essay on photographer Paul Strand,where he compares Strand's style to that of the Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson:

"One could say that it was the antithesis to Henri-Cartier Bresson's.
The photographic moment for Cartier-Bresson is an instant, a fraction
of a second, and he stalks that instant as though it were a wild
animal. The photographic moment for Strand is a biographical or
historic moment, whose duration is ideally measured not by seconds but
by its relation to a lifetime. Strand does not pursue an instant, but
encourages a moment to arise as one might encourage a story be told."

Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, © Henri Cartier-Bresson 1932

The Family, Luzzara, Italy © Paul Strand 1953

I have recently begun another project looking at the built landscape in India. For this project, I have been using a 4x5 inch view camera, which has slowed down the process of making pictures. I will share some images from this project in a later post.

Mumbai's Cinema Halls

2007-04-21T05:09:00.002+05:30

The following project explores the inner arteries of Mumbai’s cinema halls. The buildings themselves are the narrators, speaking of the subliminal psychology of their form, their interaction with audiences and staff through the years, and finally, of their status–and eventual decay–as societal ideals.

© Zubin Pastakia 2007

To view more images from my project on Cinema Halls, click here to go to my photography portfolio website.

The project was partly supported by a fellowship from SARAI and The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). Many thanks to all the people there for believing that this was something worth doing.