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PHOTOGRAPHY AS METAPHOR
written and photographed by PINAKI CHAKRAVARTY
“In photography, nothing is as it appears to be�

LOCATION, LOCATION
Spatial considerations

It is so cold my hands ache, and I jab incoherently at the shutter, barely registering its mechanical slap as I stand at the edge of Sela Lake in India’s Arunachal Pradesh, blinded by sunlight over fresh snow and the thrill that comes with being the only person around, from one ice-caked horizon to the next. At first sight, such landscape has everything needed to envelope a photographer in a lifetime of glory: monumental scenery, great light and the knowledge that you have a better viewpoint than anyone else. For one brief moment, somewhere south of Tibet, you shine like never before. But that’s just location. Everything else is downhill from there on. Chances are that if you haul a busload of weekend photographers from Tawang, Bomdilla or any of the other frontier towns of the region, they’re all going to do the same thing: point at their subject and shoot. Given a wide enough lens, they’ll get as much of the lake and mountains as they can. How much of the scene they will capture depends on how wide a lens they have. This is inclusive photography, the most common kind, and one that requires the least amount of thinking. But if you simply include everything, you really are seeing without seeing. There’s a lot of photography today that does this, and does it successfully enough to win awards. But like those shot at Sela’s unbeatable location, these might just be good photographs because the photographer was there, and something happened. Such an image has less to do with a photographer and more to do with a scene. In being so, it is certainly more truthful, and infinitely more boring. If there is no stamp of the photographer in that scene, on that image (i.e. if any other person could have shot the same image by just being there at the same time) then the photographer deserves no credit other than for simply picking up his camera. We’re aiming at personal style here, not simple documentation.

THROWING AWAY
The beauty of having less

But photography gets more interesting when you concentrate on leaving things out, rather than having them in. This might sound complicated, but it is painfully simple, the most basic building block of composition. What we choose to have in and leave out determines the final image we will make, or at least the spatial elements of it. Added to this, delicate layer upon layer, are factors like colour, lighting, and whatever else we might add, use or manipulate. Our eyes don’t compose, because they see everything. We have to put a frame in front to create something, an art that didn’t exist before. And how we frame what we had originally seen in its entirety determines what sort of an artist we are, and how we visualise and interpret the world. Such composition might begin to sound a bit pompous, the stuff of so-called ‘fine art photographers�(there are few things more pathetic than a self-confessed artist anyway �the term should be applied by the audience, not the photographer). But dumbing things down to their bare minimum is a philosophy so old it actually predates any kind of art form in existence now. Far away from anything to do with the way we think about images today, the women of the Walbiri of Central Australia have been telling ‘sand stories�for ages. They begin by levelling a patch of sand, making marks through it and erasing them as the narrative continues. But when they draw a kangaroo, they don’t draw its shape, or anything as literal as that. Instead, they use a single line with a series of marks on either side. This shows the tracks of the kangaroo on either side of the mark left by its tail. People, unless sleeping, are not shown as basic sticks, as you might imagine, but as U-shapes, turning in various directions depending on which way the person is supposed to be facing. The U-shape is the mark left on the ground by a person sitting
cross-legged. The important thing to note here is that the image of a trace (the marks in the sand were of traces of the kangaroo, not the kangaroos themselves) is an abstraction, something that we have created out of reality, or distilled: a highly visual version of what really is a three-dimensional subject. In a way, any sort of photography is an abstraction, because at the very least it is creating a two-dimensional image out of 3D reality. But photography can also be abstract in its composition, by cutting out much of the scene and focusing on a shape or tone that is understood to belong to the larger whole. In creating this abstraction we are making the most important decision of the photographer. This is, in many ways, the key to an original image.

METAPHOR
Giving birth to meaning

In photography, metaphors play an important role too, because we simply cannot show everything, or shoot everyone. We need to show a part, or one subject, that will represent the idea of what we want to convey. There are a million things present on the road from Sela to China, more peaks, rocks, tons of snow and graffiti-stained rocks than you can photograph. What are you going to do? Find something that embodies the spirit of the place and shoot it. Simply scratching the surface and looking closer sets you apart from the others trying to fit everything in. Abstractions and metaphors are tied together �perhaps the first have more to do with shape and form, while the latter have to do with subject matter. Metaphors usually come with a given meaning for the context in which they are used, while abstractions are sometimes open to interpretation. If Van Gogh’s Starry Night was just a starry night that would have been the end of the story. But the more people see into it the greater its perceived value. My photographs of icy formations on the frozen lakes and slopes on either side can be viewed on many levels, only some of which have been determined by me. The rest is up to the viewer, to rubbish or to weep at. But they might also be metaphors depending on how I use them for my article. Human civilisation has thrived on such meaning, the meaning we create and give objects that we carve in the likeness of ourselves and of those who we aspire to be. We need something tangible, something in the vague vacuum of life and the incomprehensible dimensions of the universe to hold on to. It simply is too much to deal with otherwise. Photography is no different. We capture moments of life at fractions of a second, through circuit boards, CMOS sensors, CF cards and hard drives, and think this is reality. And in some convoluted human way, it just might be. So remember, every time you click you are leaving out things just as you are including them, and each action and its consequences will be a part of your final image. In photography, nothing is as it seems. Sometimes, it’s best to just point and shoot.