The Spaniard In The Works

here.

And some image of text(tho taken out of context they make no sense whatsoever, I realise. This may disappear tomorrow):

Everybody needs a way in to where they're going. Mine was John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man. I'd read it before, but I re-read small bits of it again to remind myself that all cities have a shadow self that nobody official will show you. I may not have found it, or might have only caught glimpses of it, but at least I knew it was there.

*

Conferences are things beyond my experience - never attended them, never needed to. It was fascinating, as a consequence, to observe the conference birds in their habitat: they move at an eager angle, with a pack of cards in their hands. These cards are exchanged as if one hand must not know what the other one does. Quiet murmurs accompany this exchange.

Needless to say, I do not have a card and don't intend to get one. What will people want to know - how to get in touch? I can always scribble my email on the back of some else's card, no?


*

I was, strangely enough, not bored at all during these conferences. Since I was not a journalist, I didn't really need to take notes or network or anything, but I took (some) notes anyway, because I figured that in the normal course of my life no one would invite me to observe a seminar on how ports work, or take me to high-security container terminals (no photography allowed), or give me a close-up tour of the harbour and even offer to slow the boat if I needed take specific photographs.

More importantly for me, these official interactions really did help me understand some things about the way government works, and the pride people working for it take in their work. It also gave me the license to be nosy and ask any question I wanted and there were people who would answer. One young gentleman knew everything about this city he had made his own.

*

That's another thing: the number of people who live in Hamburg who are from elsewhere. Not that it's a huge city or anything, but given the nature of my trip you'd think I'd meet at least a few people who were born there. I met two: one was a second generation Chinese woman, whose eyes flickered slightly in annoyance when I asked (as I routinely asked everyone) where she was from; and the other was one of the people in Hamburg Marketing. Like the average Bombayite, the average person from Hamburg is fiercely loyal to their city.

*

I just couldn't get why everyone kept asking if we found the place too cold. It wasn't. It was just fine. Two sunny days out of six is pretty damn good.

*

Yes, yes, okay. You want to know what I packed and what I couldn't. That's a whole other post, right?

Coming up tomorrow.

Update: Images here.

Okay, that's over now!

And I don't even know how to begin.

This has to be the fastest I've ever worked: I left Hyderabad on the 24 Oct with nothing except a camera, and had an exhibition of 50 photographs and some text ready to view on 12 Nov. That's six shooting days in Hamburg, three days in Bombay to make prints and 4-5 days in Hyderabad to have framed 50 photographs and think about and create text.

As I've said elsewhere, I should always work like this. I loved the pressure most especially because there was no pressure to do anything specific except create what I wanted to. Nobody was standing over me asking to see what I'd done so far, no one was wringing their hands about directions, or wanted to know in advance what they could expect.

This post is, of course, a rather off-the-cuff series of remarks about my experiences.

What really had me anxious before I left was the question of how to photograph a city in six days. What is a city anyway? Most often it is its public spaces - buildings of note, cliches about what makes it 'special'. What about people? How would I tell, looking at anybody, what made them belong to a city, and what their relationship with it was?

I used the text to explicate or think about some of these things. Being able to search for anything on the net and read up about it in advance is both a curse and a blessing: sometimes I felt I knew too much and knew nothing of any worth.

The other anxiety-inducing thing about the trip was that I had no second chances. Our days were packed, sometimes in a very press-junket-y way. There were conferences that chewed up half the day; we were taken from one place to the next and I knew I could never photograph the harbour again, or the marine training centre.

I was also worried about shooting in the rain - the results were iffy at best, and unuseable at worse. What if it rained the morning we were on the harbour? (As it happened, it did, but not in some disastrous way, as the image on the poster will show).

The most interesting thing about the project was how I was constantly having to re-shape the intent of the project on an intellectual level, with what was happening every day around me. Let me explain:

I was working with only the barest sketch of what I wanted to do with the photographs, but the barest minimum included working with text, with the immigrant quarter, and the idea of taking images back to absent people. This last meant I already knew there were some arrangements of frame and composition I wanted in advance, though I didn't know how or where the opprtunity would offer itself to me. This meant I had to be intuitive and alert all the time. In practice, this meant that at the end of every day, as I uploaded the 100-150 odd photographs I had shot that day, that I had to view and select, shortlist and discard in the space of two or three hours, so that later I would not have to re-view 600 and more images and be overhwelmed. What I was, in effect, doing was making decisions that I was going to stand by, whether they were the right ones or not. I was going to choose even before I had time to abosrb and trust that what I had experienced suring the day was enough to guide my perceptions at night.

The other interesting thing was the inclusion of text in the images. I had decided in advance that I would do this twice: for one text, I would need empty roads; for the other, I would need a wall. The text would be used on the image, but made to look as it if had always been there, already beena part of the 'real' place. I did this because I wanted to think about what we mean when we say 'documentary' images - which is what one would commonly assume a project like this one would involve.

I wanted to think about this because even the most 'documentary' image, even before the age of Photoshop, used darkroom techniques to change the image: whether in the choice of paper used in printing, or exposure, or several other combinations of techniques. What if I made it obvious that I was intervening in the image, but made it hard for the viewer to see how? What if a road in the early morning outside the main bus station, had the most unlikely text painted on to the road? How long would the viewer stand in front of this image trying to puzzle it out and what would they make of it?

So there was that.

The other thing was how to combine the images, and what order and how much to control of where a viewer would stand first?

(One image from my very short trip to Bergen-Belsen, gives no indication of where it was taken. It was meant to be the last image viewed but that's not how the arrangement worked in the gallery. That should have been interesting also.)

Phew. Okay, I've gone on long enough. I knwo everyone wants to see the images. Some are supposed to be on the gallery website, but they're not up yet. Will link when they are.

It goes without saying that many of you who read this blog have images that had you in mind when I shot them or when I viewed them and realised they reminded me of you.

More about that soon.

Oh: on the day of the opening, the most dramatic moment was when my son's bus didn't turn up until an hour later than it usually does and my mother was frantic but I was in a press conference (to which nobody came because of the GHMC election rallies that were more newsworthy) so I didn't know she was calling and she was sobbing over the phone when I did return her call. The bus turned up, no harm done, but it was a nice few moments of total panic.

When you add (and save) enough blogs and posts on your feedreader, the numbers eventually begin to look like dates from history*.

Additions in the last two days include Tao Lin's blog (nice url, yes?) and zunguzungu.

*

In other news, I had a duplicate print of a photo I really liked, which I had made in Bombay and couriered to someone who hasn't got it yet. This depresses me immensely because it means either someone in the studio or the courier is responsible for its loss, but I'm now too far away to do anything (much) about it.

*

I'm using test prints like a pack of cards to decide how I want to arrange the images. I've more or less decided, but holding the uneven-sized prints makes me feel like I'm playing Patience - which, if you think about it, I am.


*Bloglines tells me it's 1925 today.

So this is where I've been and what I've been doing.





If you're in Hyderabad, please come.

That's on the 12th of November, from 5pm to 6pm at Kalakriti Art Gallery, Road No. 10, Banjara Hills.

The exhibition will be on until the 18th. So if you're in town and can't make it to the opening, drop by on any other day.

(There will be more posts but only after the exhibition has opened.)

Did ya'll miss me?

Updates from tomorrow. Now I need to sleep.

Via email from Aparna Rayaprol:

The Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust

&

Department of English, University of Hyderabad

Invite you to the presentation of the inaugural

Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize

to

ADITI MACHADO

Presentation by: Padmabhushan

Prof. Shiv K. Kumar

Chief Guest:

Sudeep Sen, poet and editor, Atlas

Poetry Reading:

Aditi Machado

RSVP:

9490317318/rayaproltrust@gmail.com

to

Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 5.00 pm

Saptaparni, Road No. 8, Banjara Hills

Congrats Aditi!

The new issue of Pratilipi is up and no, this is not a pointer to anything I've contributed!

Look out for the six essays by Keki Daruwalla, K. Sachidanandan, Priya Sarukkai-Chhabria, Arshia Sattar, Noor Zaheer and Giriraj Kiradoo (also co-editor of Pratilipi).

Also two of Vivek Narayanan's poems (about which* more when I return**.)

__

* And that's a promise, Vivek.

** This is also the time to say that there will be no more posts until mid-November. I'm travelling until then. I'm on mail, of course, but the Spaniard will be asleep.

In the last year I have carried The Book of Disquiet with me everywhere. If it means I must carry a bag large enough to accommodate it, I find one that fits the purpose. Only in the last few weeks, Pessoa stands in the bookshelf with the glass front that once belonged to my grandfather (who kept in it a flat, small round of Vicks that he would take out and sniff. To me, the smell was magical and meant possibilities). The cover - with one man shot, his back arched and his hands flung up in the air, and another caught mid-stride, his day's purpose re-shaped - looks out at me every time I pass.

It would be a crude formulation to say that I have learnt immense amounts from Pessoa but it is a crudity that is given shape by my inability to put any of that 'learning' into practice in the last year. I dip into the book when I want to know what the day holds for me; to find the words for things long known; to confirm my objective self-pity. I consult it as I would an oracle.

So here's Pessoa in Poetry this month, translated by Richard Zenith:

In me every thought, however much I’d like to preserve it intact, turns sooner or later into reverie. If I wish to set forth reasons or launch a train of argument, what comes out of me are sentences initially expressive of the thought itself, then phrases subsidiary to those initial sentences, and finally shadows and derivatives of those subsidiary phrases. I begin to meditate on the existence of God and soon find myself speaking of faraway parks, feudal processions, rivers that pass almost soundlessly beneath the windows of my contemplation . . . And I find myself speaking about them because I find myself seeing them, feeling them, and there’s a brief moment when my face is grazed by a real breeze rising from the surface of the dreamed river through metaphors, through the stylistic feudalism of my central self-abandon.

See?

See also [via Mitali Saran].

Space Bar is ready to throw a tantrum. Who wants to join her?