Cosmic Insignificant Size of an Elephant; Authenticity of Womanhood in Rural India; Monuments of NoBodies and People Living Nowhere like a Normal Household; Animal – Human Bodies:
Notes on Out of Glamour Photo Collection
A lady walked towards me, she was quite old, walking slowly like an agitated protester of the new world. she looked at me for a moment and lay near to me in the bunch I was sitting, holding her tote bag tightly. At the same time, she was resting, a faded maroon color sari with a small polka dot-like print on it, silver garments, white hair, wrinkled and dark, skin-deep traditional tattoos; all of it stimulated a faraway galaxy in my eyes… Her choice of style showed me an exception in Beauty… Maybe that was an Initial point I started looking at my photographs to search how all these random bodies, textures, colors, archetypes, forms, shades, and everything else in it connect each other; and I could only find life as the only idea in them to contemplate…But this incident was the provocation to make a photo collection named Out of Glamour…
Ninety-eight Photographs from South India, specifically from Tumkur (Karnataka), Chennai, Tranquebar, Mahabalipuram (Tamil Nādu), Pondicherry, Hyderabad, and Kerala are included in the collection called Out of Glamour… All photographs are taken with a Mobile Camera; very few photographs this reason went unclear and it limited the size I can print. But later as I mentioned above, not considering its pixel quality, and giving more importance to the subjects of each photograph made me determined to realize this project.
The Incredible Women from Rural India. Their Authenticity is as sharp - as a knife.
In my view, Introspection is no more a fancy idea of self-contemplation but a strong internal argument within a self with outer elements; like any kind of information, ideas, ideology, Politics, Philosophies, Food, Art, our fellow humans, etc; a Conflict within one body and mind with all the factors which uncover the world to it.
In the post-human era, it is immensely important to find value in the wisdom a human body attains over a lifetime. Photographs in Out of Glamour layered this complexity between the Body as a system and life as a phenomenon of existence. Considering the role of each of us to discover and share an embodied life of a person totally stranger to us or unseen or untold to the world; This is to remind and erase the brutality we do to our fellow humans very often to test the very sensitivity of their human nature. We lost our vital layers of humanity for doing an undo for a perfect humanism! An era of extreme Cyborgs v/s Humans is closer, it is a time we collectively must agree on the fact each of us carries a universe of ours! If so, don’t you think every single person in the world co-exist? it is clearer that our basic education fails to make us understand the primary connection we all carry as humans than just understanding human species through the literature of evolution and as a biological Ecosystem living on the earth above all species and energy sources. In the new world, market-oriented educational courses are emerging in dozens every year, we pass times when wars are executed in nano forms, in small clusters; we own a global market where multinational entities already started popularizing and educating about nuclear weapons for selling these new ultra-sophisticated threats to humanity in the forms of fancy market commodities. In all this modernist consumerist post-truth era our men and women lost horror over violence and war. Resistance over oppression, violence, and war are broken and weak… so that it is not idiotic to say, the human race will disappear from the planet Earth just by killing each other...!
It was very uneasy in the beginning to look at these people’s lives as a stranger, each time I felt a moment of vulnerability with them; even a silent knock on them from AnyBody could make fire.
This journey unfolded many of life I never imagined before, this is a quest to appreciate the world we live in but we don’t see often, their vulnerable gaze, questions, and how this person connected to us! who all they are...! What did they say? Where are they now? the heart aches…They lived in my life, in my memory, and through these photographs. These photographs no longer represent any geography or particular people, but they showcase the Body as a system and life as a phenomenon of existence or drastic polarities among the extremely marginalized and poor people in India.
In a highly consumerist world, we need everything colorful and eye catchy; in high definition, we continue to exoticize every war, natural calamity, and all other disasters, but millions of people aren’t able to live up to these toxic standards of the new world, always unseen and excluded from our prime time show biz.
How long do we take to understand that every single human action will affect each other and rest of the humankind? it is wonder, so complex and structured how every one of us, every consciousness manifested and embodied in the universe...!
In a toxic consumerist world, everybody is targeted by everyone.
They are looking/watching,
They are in conversation,
They are on a journey,
They are alone,
They are waiting,
They are homeless,
They are marketing,
They are tired and haunting,
Where must we have been looking if we didn’t look at them or them?
In a constant watching, looking everywhere at everyone and everything,
are we often forgetting to look at ourselves authentically for a moment or long?