Snacking on the Letter ‘P’ – Photography and Paalgova

Photography

“Every girl who can aim a camera thinks she’s a photographer. Oooh, you took a black and white picture of a lawn chair and its shadow and developed it at Save-On; you must be brooding and deep” – Stewie (from Family Guy).

My first click happened on a SLR camera around ten years ago. An uncle who was a photographer was teaching me how to take a picture. I remember the snap. He was in the middle of asking me to ” pause, stay and steady, then click”. But I was already in a hurry to try it out. As a result, with my uncle as the subject, the photograph captured him looking constipated. My first camera, truly, came into my hands only a year back. It was a CanonA720 IS. With it, I not only explored a foreign country, but rummaged through my alienated feelings. Stranger to strangeness, the camera helped me crack my voice. I went non-stop with the shutterbug. Everything had to be immediately translated for me through the camera. I experienced exhilaration and liberation in simulation. I carelessly nurtured an inflation of desire. Six months later, I bought myself a DSLR. Since then I have been through various stages of obsession with the photographic image/product. Collectively, I went through times when first I thought I was creating magic by making perfect compositions, later on I felt I was turning out to be a real artist – that I had an ‘eye for pictures’. I clicked many pictures feigning photographic art. From this hypocrite self, I moved to a phase where I battled with Photoshop. I wanted to believe anyone could create the pictures which professional photographers manufactured. And I did – not just create similar ‘art work’ but reaffirm belief in the fact that, with equipments and software anyone could do the same. Along this hitch-hiked journey of mine, I got to peer at plenty of pictures – of people, spaces, conditions and illusions. I began to detest the scopophilic authority cameras gave the ‘master’. What was first a weapon of self-expression later became understood as an institutionalized tool for voyeurism. The discomfort in pointing the camera at people and their spaces increased. That did not make me refrain from taking pictures. This overwhelming dissonance finally dropped me off with Barthes, Baudrillard and Bourdieu.

With the possession of my first camera, I often wondered about all the kids I knew from school who had access to a camera or a video recorder and did nothing with them – dysfunctional, I should think of their childhood. Yes, it all boiled down to one’s financial status. My ‘bohemian’ parents rationalized lack as bliss. So when instruments of art and those that helped artistic expression all fell into the expensive category, my proclivity towards ‘art’ got muddled with questions and I responded with withdrawal. This can explain why photography is not only the art for the haves exclusively, but in most cases the have-nots easily become its subjects. Pierre Bourdieu in Photography: A Middle-brow Art investigates the sociology of photography in detail. He argues against the belief that ‘photography has made aesthetic experience available to everyone.’ He concludes –  “The very reasons that turn the privileged classes away from the photography may in fact incline certain members of the middle classes to seek in it a substitute within their reach for the consecrated practices which remain inaccessible to them.”

How does one’s motivation for photographic consumption differ from photographic production? Do you know why you picked up the camera? Do you know why you point at things that already have photographic syntax ascribed onto them? Can you tell if your camera eye enacts out learned pretense? If the answers to these questions confirm an ambiguous intention behind the camera, then, what features in front of the camera? What kind of ambiguity do we produce within an image? Jean Baudrillard’s conception of ‘simulation’ befits the photograph. One creates a simulacrum while attempting to ‘realize’ the real. The act of clicking at something real to make it seem ‘realistic’ is embedded in the aesthetic structure of photography. He further adds – “And the ‘realizing’ of the world, through science and technology, is precisely what simulation is – the exorcism of the terror of illusion by the most sophisticated means of the ‘realization of the world.’” In order to battle with the fear that life could be an illusion, simulations help restore reality, materially. Photography is one such tool that negates this ‘truth’. Roland Barthes puts forth that the photographic image, which is only a ‘mechanical analogue to reality’, is laden with multiple signs/messages. The simulated reality in a photograph, inadvertently becomes a text (in-process and constantly renders itself for interpretation).

While I agree that, photography is definitely a ‘middle-brow art’; however, I contend its inconclusive control over meaning and motive allows us to experiment with/through its medium into our existence. As universal as it may be, the politics of hypocrisy penetrate all forms of expression. Photography is an activity not art.

Paalgova (Milk Fudge)

Small squares of dark white ‘milk sweet’ wrapped in transparent greasy paper and that which smelt of sweetness only childhood knows of. I remember those pleasantly quiet walks in the evening with my father and little brother. I do not remember how much Paalgova costed then, but my brother and I knew that it was not every day that Dad could buy us that. We walked to that shop on the main road with a hidden glee – we were always taught to be suspicious of happiness, so we learnt not to pompously exhibit it. The shop had a large board saying Singaravelan Stores. I did not like Mr. Singaravelan. He always sneered at us. My brother and I were shy kids. We hid behind father while he bought us the milk sweet, which were placed right on the counter. You needn’t walk the aisle into the shop. It was right there – temptations at the porch. On our way back, with the rushing traffic of the main road behind us, we no longer held on to father’s hands. We were busy unwrapping the miniature sweet bundle. I would take very tiny bites, so that it would last until we get home and I could relish it for a longer time. I miss those days of warm nights and small family meals. Many conclude that childhood is about innocence. It never was. It was saturated with interaction with our selves and brewing awareness of our lives.  I miss life when, from my toddler height’s point of vision adults were adults, taller, and always on a seemingly flawless pedestal. Now, the world and its flaws (people) are all too conspicuous.

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