On photography

Koln, September 30, 2007


constructing koln

My camera is hopelessly underequipped to capture the fleeting, the random, the ambiguous, the implied. Not surprisingly so. It seems pointless to even attempt to capture within its frame what are often moments that the mind can align perfectly into a mental frame, complete with irony and metaphor, but that the lens will struggle with.

Random moments in Koln stack themselves up in postcard clarity. A bunch of kids dressed all in black: Goth, and seriously so, sprawled along a long set of stairs, Koln's own Gothic masterpiece, the cathedral, rising up in sombre silence behind them. Ironic, but too tall, all of it, to smudge into one frame.

Then around the corner, stomping through the drizzle, a Turkish wedding party unfolds itself. Everybody immaculately dressed and made up. Boys' hair gelled, girls in bronzed make up, everybody exuding exotic scents. I wish I had the looks on the boys' faces - a sort of aggressive sexuality mixed with the confidence of good clothes and post-adolescence. But it would be strange to stop in their midst and photograph them.

And finally walking down the road, picking their way through the rubble of one of Koln's many construction sites, a row of black-hooded nuns, trailing melancholia and sombriety in their path - or maybe it was just the grey weather - but it is a lasting image, their bobbing weave of black and white. It's a mind image though: still fresh. My camera was safely dry in my bag.

beginnings

One year of moaning sirens,
yellow staccato 'appeal for witnesses' signs,
four tragic events - one shoot out, two accidents and one serious assault - all under the narrow shell of my window
and then suddenly a long journey to stansted.
a tube, a train, a flight, a bus, a train, a bus. a climb. a walk.
dinner, night-time.
then the morning and a galaxy away from london's understated bells of doom. an art academy scrunched prettily in between the woods and a castle. a tiny city gleaming white and red from in between the castle's arches. artists, designers, writers, someone's parents. all you can hear is the wind in the trees, somebody's loud conversation.
i am trying to imagine what visiting fellows do, what aspiring writers do, what artists do, when under a blue cloud-sodden sky in the middle of nowhere, but my imagination fails me. ideas are snaking around in my mind though and stories are waiting to be written, so maybe i will go now, and write them before they dissipate.

Where is the ladies?

The Tate Modern has new displays on cities - looking at them in terms of space, density, speed and so on with statistics, photographs and films to document the dynamics of some of the world's largest cities.

What fascinated me enough to go back again was Paromita Vohra's Q2P.

The second time around, I watched bits of it with a contrarian friend (I wish he would read this blog, but he's busy scrabbling for controversy and virtual fights elsewhere in cyberspace and none of that here!) who got completely peeved with what he seemed to consider the upper caste gaze of the filmmaker and her condescending jibes at the sort of Regular Roadside Romeo figures (in caps to mark my utmost respect for this ubiquitious constituent of life on an Indian street) who were being constantly interviewed through the film.

The filmmaker is out exploring the marginalising of women in India's public spaces and the reductivist view of her (seen as an object, rather than as a real human being with bodily functions, for instance) in popular culture and in people's attitudes and then watching this translate onto the larger canvas of public planning and city growth that ignores women.

The filmmaker chooses the gendered spaces of women's toilets looking at their practicalities and realities to reflect on the space women occupy in public. She looks at where they are situated, how small they are, how much they cost to use, who else occupies them and so on. She interviews members of the Sulabh group who set up a network of public toilets, asking them questions that relate to women's use. She interviews men. The interviews with the men are what friend objected to - most interviewees produced sniggers or looks of disbelief from the audience as they offered views which suggested they could not view women as needing to perform the same functions as them or having real needs.

Friend thought this was pointless - almost as if she was using the unknown man on the street as a fall guy and poking fun at his views? Perhaps because you could argue that these men were part of a larger culture and could not be isolated from it and then ridiculed in these rarified spaces of art gallery/sensitive film audience?

Seemed to me though like she was using irony to demonstrate how institutionalised some beliefs were. Does she not have the license to do that, to make her larger point more effective?

Watch the clip, but better still watch the entire film if you can.

In the darkest hour there may be light

The first few moments of walking into an exhibition of contemporary art are always, for me, completely disorienting. You have no idea if you'll "get it" or if you can find any anchors within your own experiences for what you're seeing.

And so, this weekend when a bunch of us trooped off to take a look at Damien Hirst's new murderme collection at the Serpentine- "In the darkest hour there may be light", my first few moments, spent gazing at Sarah Lucas' "big silkscreen print of Sunday Sport porn shots and a neon casket (in the darkest hour there may be light, as it were)" threw me somewhat, but then after some meandering around the somewhat random collection, we ran up against the first Angus Fairhurst.

I saw it - huge photograph against a stark white wall and it hit me...

because it's big and strange and stark but then I bent down to take in the name of the piece and the artist and then it hit me even harder because the piece is called The Pieta and a print of that other, original, Pieta has been hanging in my father's room ever since I was 12. Right above the desk I studied for computer exams at so I really have it etched in my mind and the contrast couldn't be starker because, of course, the original Pieta (Michelangelo's) looks like this:

That done I was completely hooked. Of course for a long while I pondered that eternal favourite "what is art" question because to me it wasn't the piece that was engaging in itself but my subsequently being jolted by the comparison of mood and representation between the two pieces and that occurred only after I read those two words - "The Pieta", not from the piece itself.

Unfortunately not so much excitement after that, except of course for a Banksy right across the room: the iconic image of the Vietnamese girl screaming and running after the napalm bombing- except in this representation she's being led on either side by Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse. Her terror is particularly contrasted by Mickey Mouse's bland smile and McDonald's goofy grin... imagine to find Banksy in an art gallery after chasing him around all over the damn place. The irony.