It had been proclaimed that the photograph is dead. Yet it thrives, morphing to respond to an ever shifting contemporary. In many senses it is irreplaceable. As ‘truth’ becomes contested, photographic idioms and metaphors have evolved to speak to new ‘realities’. Technology appears to have changed everything. In the post-truth technoshpere, the photograph too has been transformed – Not only how it sees, but also where and what it sees has changed.
How does one make sense of the world now? A turn to the personal and intimate proposes a way to comprehend the fuzzy horizons of an uncertain, increasingly uniform world.
The personal and political merge like never before in a tighter bind, as a way to regain one’s agency. As a document of our times, the still image has been relocated within a multi-materiality of moving images, sound and everyday objects to create new meanings. The photograph emerges as a re-assertion of identity and uniqueness.
Intimate Documents showcases seven deeply engaged contemporary photography practices in South Asia, which are helping create its renewed language. Recognising the shifting registers both of the medium as well as of the personal, they seek to carve out precise ways in which the photograph continues to produce a world in flux.
Anoop Ray
Friends and their Friends
“They are from a personal space of my world. These images come from relationships, not observation. This body of work is my diary, my relationships and my history.”
Chandan Gomes
There are things I call home
“I grew up with things, objects. I started understanding people, in some cases defining them, through objects. Despite photographing my own house, I felt like an outsider.”
This World of Dew (2011-2015)
An artist book by Chandan Gomes
Published by PHOTOINK
“A soliloquy on loss and remembrance – a young child’s yearning for the mountains and my search for that child, whose nameless drawing book I found abandoned in the hospice.”
Chinar Shah
The River
“The residues of the last bits of the river as I collected water from it and its traces of life before they poured in their concrete, as the last remains of some sanity before luxury.”
Indu Antony
Vincent Uncle
“Acknowledging the conscious and unconscious mind intertwined with one’s imagination and reality – A puzzle with many pieces in the form of evidences emerge while digging through these memory boxes and dreams.”
Sohrab Hura
Life is elsewhere (2005-11)
“My life, my family, my love, my friends, my travels… a book of contradictions and of doubts and understandings and of laughter and forgetting in which I am trying to constantly question myself – by simply documenting the broken fragments of my life which might seem to be completely disconnected to one another on their own. “
Urban Re – Imagined
Ravi Agarwal
Pooja Iranna and Gigi Scaria
Another New Beginning
Animation 7.50 Minutes, 2010
Size : 16:9
“We have successfully managed to use our cultural as well as technical knowledge along with positive energies, to construct the unthinkable. Though we seem to have reached our zenith in many ways, the human mind is such that we can express our ingenuity, when the time asks for it.”
The Urban Reimagined (Public Art Project)
Urban spaces are increasingly creating new contestations of global capital and local realities. The urban has been defined separate from the rural, even though society seamlessly circulates between them. As these spaces are carved out of what were terrains of multiple inhabitations, what was once ecological is becoming polluted, gentrified or destroyed. The project highlights the clash of the imaginaries within such spaces, as a means to help rethink them.
Conceptual Photography as Artistic Expression (workshop)
This workshop is a space to explore the changing nature of the photograph. As binaries between documentary and fiction, new and old media, fantasy and realism, still and moving image collapse, the contemporary photographer has to work in a radically different landscape; a new visual culture that calls for a multiplicity of photographic forms. The production and consumption of millions of images a day has almost people immune to them, and a ‘death of photography,’ has been announced. The question is how, then, can images be made in a ‘post-photographic condition’? This workshop will explore ways in which photography can become a process-oriented medium to observe and explore various theoretical and conceptual frameworks. By engaging with existing modes of photography and actively exploring what the future of the medium holds, it will attempt to create a space for making art in dialogue with society, politics and culture.
Eco-locality Explorations (Walks): Panjim city, like other cities , lies in the midst of a rich ecological system. Surrounded by wetlands, beaches, waterbodies and forests replete with a variety of animals, birds, flora and fauna, they silently give the location its verdant character. Often missed by most visitors, this is an opportunity to discover the varied ecology of the area through guided walks with experts.