By: DIBYASHNATA TALUKDAR, GAUHATI UNIVERSITY- MASS COMUNICATION
David Bailey, the famous British photographer had once said, “It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary.”
Photography can mean anything to anyone to see. By saying anything or even nothing, photography itself encompasses a universe of endless possibilities. To a sexagenarian, an old sepia-toned picture sticked to the oldest ‘family albums’ can be a treasure of endless nostalgias; a brightly hued roadside hoarding of a fancy automobile can instantly become someone’s dream machine; a picture depicting untold trauma and affliction can play a catalyst to a soul awakening dawn for a philanthropist. It’s just how one takes it to be.
Photographs are popularly said to be effective, or in a layman’s word, a good picture is that which is said to carry stories in its two-dimensional space. Most of the time, a picture is clicked in a momentary kinetics of the mental imaginative reflexes. The outcome may vary from a portrayal of a visual story at one time to a simply marvelous piece of raw nature at another. It so happens that, you go, you see, and you capture. The result can be anything from a bewildering exclamation to an absolute, abstract, nothing for a spectator.
What I find the most spectacular about photography is how any random moment in the time is captured in a limited dimensional space, and that space is actually so much more than what it is in its mass. It’s like arresting time itself on a flat surface. So who said that you can’t stop time after all?
On a leisurely afternoon, go to one of those old cupboards or racks, and pull out those thick heavy ancient family photo albums, which once had rosy fashioned cover pages, and now are mostly laded with house dust and hazy memories. Wiping the dust off and opening them in your lap, is what I like to call it, no less than a ‘Mohenjo-daro discovery’ moment where precious treasures are dug up from lost times only to become priceless with more time to come. Just like pickles and wines, photographs are ‘the older, the better’. These old pictures have their own certain vintage debonair elegance. Every tone, every posture, each face and the expressions they bore, has a tale to tell. These pictures perhaps were originally clicked with not much of an artistic ambition but only to keep a record of the evolving family demography, or just simply to make ‘the moment’ visibly stay forever, for the sheer pleasure of seeing one’s picture resting in a place, or to be viewed by all and to sometimes provide an ingredient to a perfect ‘conversation starting recipe.
These kind of photography has largely inspired me through out and it so happens that I have developed a keen interest on human moments to the maximum. A well clicked picture concentrating on human behavior is much more thought-provoking and layered in content than many of the other forms of this art. What makes it so intriguing is that human nature is as mysterious as the vastness of the sky and the depth of the ocean. When the subject is so incomprehensible in nature, its photography emphatically leaves more room for interpretation and imagination than any of the other branches of photography. I had indulged myself many a time capturing random human moments, with an effort to grab those fleeting seconds which may naturally go unnoticed and out of consciousness, which otherwise when locked in and reproduced actually do capture a whole new world of its own. In those fleeting seconds are endless discoveries to be made by the imaginative capacity of our mind through the satellites of our vision.
Rendering David Bailey’s words, the art of Photography requires endless imagination to intake the totality of the content of the image. It can also be viewed in an another way that a photograph in itself has the capacity to instill that degree of imagination on the viewer, unlike that of a painting where the imagination at first place, enters through the lens of the painter’s vision of his or her creation, before it finally begins to elucidate the total production. It is the painter’s vision and ideology that comes under inquisition in a painting. In photography, a spectator can take the pleasure to get lost into the absorbed details of the image, while momentarily letting oneself to ignore the photographer’s original idea on its theme, or even the moment’s original significance itself that has been captured.
Quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson, “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
Stories or no stories, past panache or contemporary marvel, Photography will always make us stop by, and lose ourselves to just another time-zone or space, which has been so skillfully and with utmost precision, arrested in a plain surface, in front of our eyes.
