Calcutta Chromosomes - Fading Empire

What makes me Travel?  What do I try to see when i Travel? These are all the questions often asked in so many ways and in so many manners to me.

I usually don't like to answer them. I try to show what I see and how I feel but at times I realize that my silence through which I try to speak is half understood.

I travel to see me. Peculiar right? Indeed I often find myself boring and unintelligent in front of a well manicured mirrors in my home. They usually go on chattering the same verbs.

And then a fresh round of air makes me freer from my growing stomach and receding hairline. I travel to find me growing into an exciting homosapien, ignorant to all the best possible presets being applied on my selfies in Instagram.

I become freer from my narcissus tendencies and start looking around for a story. For a story I am unaware of. For a story I will never have to pay a price. For a story that will not yell back at me.

I travel to get soaked in rains, dusted in the muddy air and watch the humans moving endlessly ( at least they would like to believe that ) within the ceaseless singularity of Time.

I Travel to see a drama that will never happen. A piece of history which is so insignificant that none will care for. Peacefully watching the cat crossing the windows, a man chewing the tobacco as if having a sex, an old colonial story of the trams coming to a halt.

Talking about that did I mention that over here in this image I saw General Dyer crying his heart out to this native Indian man and complaining how he will miss riding the Trams!

Yes the bells are ringing. Go and have a ride on these soon to be extinct species of transport from The City of Joy - Calcutta.

Oh, do let me know if Doninique La Pierre would shed some tears hearing the news...

Folk Tales.

You asked me once - Do I love talking to you ? Yes!I love to talk to you in my own silence and burn within, in an unknown purifying desire.

I keep listening to your deep warm raven like eyes. And as I immerse in your fairy tales, I go down deeper. Deeper from where there's no return.

A sort of Fantasy.Fantasy of being with you in silence and getting lost in your waves of touches....

I fear if I telephone you and listen to your voice, then I might be losing you and your fantasy and come back to a reality - a reality that you're lost and gone!

By the way do you remember the Folk Tales we used to read, during those wet, lusty rains?

A Photographer's Mind - Stillness of a Time

"You’ve mentioned a couple of times that Italo Calvino is one of your most beloved writers. In The Adventure of a Photographer, the main character says that ‘in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can… you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness’. Do you think photography is inherently futile?"

Dayanita Singh - That’s a beautiful quote, but I think it only makes sense if you think of photography as an end in itself. But if you’re not interested in photography as pure documentation, it frees you to do so much more. My work, Time Measures, is titled after the name of one of Sebald’s poems.

I photographed these bundles of documents wrapped in fabric that I found in an archive in India. The viewer never finds out what the documents are or what they look like, and I never did unwrap them either.Does this then mean that the photographs are pointless?

Whenever people ask me how to become a good photographer, I tell them to read, jump into the world of literature. I hand them a copy of Austerlitz by Sebald, and tell them to come back to me when they’re done with it. Nobody ever comes back to me because that’s not the kind of photography they want to do.

They’re interested in instant gratification, going around with their big cameras, snapping photographs quickly without thinking. Can we raise the bar higher?

- An excerpt from an interview of famed Photographer Dayanita Singh with Apollo Magazine.