Captured Memories

Published: Verve Magazine, Nerve, September 2010

The most ignored aspect of a wedding is the one you would ideally want to do right for posterity – the pictures! Verve looks at various options for the album

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Ehsaan Faridafsar’s photograph on the adjoining page has been taken from a photo essay in Verve’s iconic black-and-white issue – there is something blissfully happy and memorable about the imagery. Having a photographer willing to render the moments of the most important day in your life in a unique fashion apparently is not something everyone hankers towards. It is surprising, considering how much money is bled into the most spectacular invitations, back presents, sets, jewellery, clothes…and yet wedding photography remains the unfortunate step-child.

Mumbai-based artist, curator and gallerist, Bose Krishnamachari traces the evolution of marriage in India to the extravaganza popularised by the maharajas of yore – and in those times, posed portraiture was the norm. As canvases evolved to bulky and expensive camera film and to the digital varieties of date, the traditional form of posed imagery still remains a part of the wedding legacy. It is only rarely – and more abroad than in India – that the photojournalistic style of wedding photography is popularised, where candid shots are taken and irreverent moments captured to add a sense of realism to the wedding album.

Matthieu Foss, photography curator and gallerist (Mumbai) feels that weddings have been restricted to a more conventional and conservative form of photography when creating the family wedding album. From the point of the photographer, Foss points out, they are using this form to merely make a living, not as a creative act. While it would be interesting for a photographer to capture moments from a poignant and radically important time in someone’s life, it appears that the subject’s lack of interest in something different would naturally stem the photographer’s creativity, making it a space that is a mere commercial stepping-stone to more absorbing pastures. And if the photographer were doing something different, it may well be in the space of satire and kitsch. Foss gives the example of French artist Jean-Christian Bourcart, whose first job as a wedding photographer led to him being ‘fascinated by those moments of joy in a crude or absurd reality,’ which later defined his other distinct photo projects.

It is not unnatural to take wedding photography a step further and explore moments in the nature of fashion photography: styled shoots inspired by high-fashion glossies; think a more involved and personal version of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City: The Movie snapped before her disastrous wedding in bridal fashion, documenting her pre-wedding preparations for an international fashion magazine. Many an aspiring socialite or fashionista would create a wedding album that looks like something out of the pages of a fashion magazine – to feel like the ultimate diva. Of course, this involves a good amount of post-processing of the images and possibly a touch up here and there!

At the other end of the glamour spectrum, with digital cameras and phone-cams, every other person considers himself/herself an amateur photographer, and impromptu and often unfortunately-candid shots of the wedding-in-process have been documented – much to the embarrassment of the couple-to-be. Loosely termed ‘contemporary wedding photography’, the professional version o f this irreverent clicking serves to capture the imagery of the wedding from the beginning to the end, without predetermined poses but with strong visual appeal.
While tradition is great when saying your vows or taking a turn around the fire, capturing eternal moments is an art and should be considered as such. With couples willing to give enough importance to the form, it may evolve into a universally appreciated aesthetic medium.

Tagged Photography Verve Magazine marriage

Moving Images

Published: Verve Magazine, Nerve, March 2010

Two Australians set off on a bike ride through Rajasthan clicking photographs along the way, which were later auctioned for charity. Verve brings an exclusive showcase of four of the shots taken by veteran director Baz Luhrmann and People’s Choice Award-winning artist Vincent Fantauzzo

A Snappy Portrait

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He’s the hot young artist with a wife of Indian (think Goa) origin and a three-month-old baby. Preferable medium of choice, oil on canvas – with a cinematic approach. Vincent Fantauzzo likes using photography and film to create a narrative that the viewer can relate to. “It’s all real art. I do a lot of photography, filming, sculptures and abstract painting. I’m completely open to all forms, letting it evolve naturally. Photography and film inspires my painting.” Not surprising then, that he’s in talks with director Baz Luhrmann (also inspired by visual arts) to blur the line between painting and film with animation.

The 33-year-old UK-born-Australian-resident exhibited his works (besides painting a mural with Luhrmann) at the Le Sutra art concept hotel, Mumbai. He’s exhibited in India three years ago, but this journey was a little bit different. Luhrmann and Fantauzzo set off on a bike ride through Rajasthan to take pictures of anything interesting that came their way, the shots then being auctioned for charity – a positive gesture through a creative act.

Going back to his stunning paintings of the late Heath Ledger and the child actor Brandon Walters from Luhrmann’s Australia that earned him the People’s Choice Award, the soft-spoken Fantauzzo says, “I’m interested in a story behind the person. Sometimes that is a space with the person in it – close-up crop section of the person. A picture speaks a thousand words and a face can do the same thing. A single image can tell a whole story leaving room for interpretation, where multiple stories can evolve. It is about not complicating art. I don’t want a person to have to be an academic or an art historian to connect with my work. It’s for everyone.”

Tagged Art and Design International Art Photography Verve Magazine

A lens-worthy construction

Published: Verve Magazine, Nerve, March 2010

Verve takes a look at artist Yamini Nayar’s photographs, created for the lens and destroyed right after

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BROOKLYN-BASED AND DETROIT-BORN YAMINI NAYAR HAS found recognition in the top international magazines. Drawing inspiration from industrial and post-industrial towns, she combines sculpture, installation and photography in her images of imagined spaces. Using raw, industrial and discarded materials, her table-top to room-size installations are built for the lens: the scenes are photographed with a large-format camera and are destroyed once the photograph is generated.

The 34-year-old artist says, “The digital studies are created parallel to the constructed images, in which they conceive of spatial systems within images of found settings, including sites of decaying industrial towns and manufacturing sites.” She goes on to elaborate, “Space is where design and everyday life intersect. It is layered; public and private grow and overlap in the traces and material culture of inhabitants – habits, histories, desires, neuroses. In addition, I’m drawn to a kind of makeshift construction and architectonics, a repurposing of materials, mirroring what you see in developing global cities where there is an inventiveness with materials, realising what is possible with what is at hand.”

Tagged Art and Design Indian Art Photography Verve Magazine

Photographic Paths and Terracotta Tiffins

Published: Verve Magazine, Nerve, August 2009

It is inspiring to see young believers who go far from the madding crowd with a desire to express themselves. Sitanshi Talati-Parikh discovers the method to the madness of two such artists

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The 21-year-old Bangalore-based artist believes it isn’t age that helps one translate thoughts on life experiences, but rather one’s sensitivity and empathetic nature. Inspired by TS Eliot’s “ability to create allusions which seemed so everlastingly contemporary to all times,” Sohini Chattopadhyay picks up on the thoughtfulness of the subject and creates metaphors on life’s situations using photography as a medium to create digital prints on archival paper. She attempts to “create the drama (or action) of images” – at the same time “generating exaggeration and levels of articulation” in her imagery, often creating a lyrical atmosphere. Perhaps cynicism hasn’t caught up with her, as she says: “The sense of striving for freedom is present in my works because I think there is a backbone of hope prevalent. And this hope is the hope of moving out, breaking paths, creating paths and striving for the goal (freedom).”

Take a peek at Sohini’s photographic imagery in her debut solo show Step In Light at Art Konsult, 23, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi (Tel: 011-26523382) before August 15.

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Twenty-five-year-old ‘studio potter’, Rashi Jain puts a clay foot forward

Is ‘Studio Pottery’ a fancy term for a terracotta art?
A ‘studio potter’ is an individual who experiments with different kinds of clay and does not merely produce pots repetitively but also extends the craft to an art form and furthermore; as a medium of expression. Unlike Europe, Japan and China, where the craft has evolved over centuries and been supported by royalty, ceramic art in India is still nascent and tagged as the common man’s matka for drinking water. Pottery has remained a craft form and innovative exploration has been bound by tradition.

Why utensils and crockery?
I see chai wallahs at every corner of a city, rows of dubba wallahs at Andheri station and peanut shells in paper cones lying on the road. The tin kettle, tea glasses and steel tiffin boxes are passive witnesses of lives unravelling, emotions and conversations. Recreating them in clay brings to life the moments that I spend with the objects.

Clay breaks away from the common mould...
Clay as a medium is flexible and allows one to explore the three dimensions thoroughly. It has a dual quality of being brittle as glass and timeless and hard as a fossil. Working with clay involves not only the bodily senses but all the forces of nature (earth, water, fire and wind). Working with one’s hands gives a tremendous feeling of control over one’s creation.

Tagged Art and Design Indian Art Photography Verve Magazine
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