Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, On Photography, Photo Technique
In Photography, Photography Workshop on September 26, 2009 at 7:00 am
The story was just not coming together. It had sounded very strong when we had been researching it – an examination of the economic and social communities that emerged around an important Sufi shrine, and what this meant for the creation of a tolerant and pluralistic culture. But the pictures that Brittany was bringing back in the first week were too literal, too obvious and lacked a connecting theme. They were a literal documentation of the economic and spiritual world that existed around the dargah of Gharib Nawaz Moinuddin Chisti. And we knew that we were looking for, hoping for, something more than the literal. But it has to be admitted that both Sara and I were initially unable to articulate what this ’something more’ would be. I at least had hoped that Brittany would just discover it once she was out working. But for at least the first week it did not seem to offer itself and the frustration and concern on Brittany’s face only grew.
She kept going out to make pictures, and kept cornering us to look at what she had found. Brittany was perhaps the most determined to find this ’something more’ we had been talking about. She spent hours pouring over her day’s take, discussing and arguing and challenging. We would look at each individual image and try to understand what was working and what was not. We talked for hours. And it was in one of these determined sessions that she would initiate that we had our breakthrough.
Brittany had become interested in the flower vendors that surrounded the dargah and realized that they would be an important element of her story. She made friends with local vendors and spent a lot of time around their warehouses and storefronts. She was determined that they were the relevant ‘economic’ element of her story. It was while discussing this with Sara Terry that they hit on the idea that the flower was in fact the story! It was that binding element that tied the whole story together, and that offered a unique way to speak about Ajmer, the culture of tolerance and pluralism around the shrine, and the economic realities that helped tie it all together! They both turned to me and said what I thought. I think I said “Hallelujah!”
Here are a few samples from Brittany’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story called The Rose of Ajmer:
Copyright Brittany Sloan
Copyright Brittany Sloan
Copyright Brittany Sloan
Copyright Brittany Sloan
Copyright Brittany Sloan
Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, On Photography, Photo Technique
In Photography, Photography Workshop on September 22, 2009 at 10:51 am
Her’s was a very personal walk. Each day Jessica would take a rickshaw to Ajmer’s Delhi gate, negotiate her way through the narrow alleys around the Gharib Nawaz dargah – clogged each day with tens of thousands of pilgrims anxious to enter what is quite possibly the most important pilgrimage center in South Asia for people of all faiths, and begin the slow near two kilometer trudge uphill to the shanties on the hills where the community of illegal Bangladeshis lived.
Each day she would enter a neighborhood that, though initially welcoming, had become increasingly concerned about her presence there. Harassed by the police, pursued by exploitative journalists and wary of ‘welfare’ workers out to make a quick buck, the community of Bangladeshis had learned to live with suspicion and doubt. A foreign woman photographer arriving at their doorsteps each day was a source of unwanted attention. They wanted her to complete her work quickly and leave. Like all the other photographers from the local newspapers did. But Jessica was there to tell a different story, and to produce a different work. So she kept coming back, kept negotiating her way in.
Her research had revealed that the issue of illegal immigrants was a hot political topic, but few had really bothered to investigate the actual lived lives of the people and the struggles and aspirations that kept them together as a community and their dignity as human beings. So Jessica kept going back to the shanties, and kept exploring. And each day she kept coming back with some remarkably personal and gentle images of a people long denigrated and dehumanized in India’s charged political climate. What amazed me was that her process was genuinely exploratory; a look at her digital files revealed a photographer relentlessly working a situation, missing her marks, but staying the course and then capturing a wonderfully evocative and intelligent frame. A real photographer’s process.
Here are a few samples from Jessica’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:
Copyright Jessica Bidgood
Copyright Jessica Bidgood
Copyright Jessica Bidgood
Copyright Jessica Bidgood
Copyright Jessica Bidgood
Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, On Photography, Photo Technique
In Photography, Photography Workshop on September 20, 2009 at 9:31 am
Hers was perhaps the subtlest way of working, one that allowed her to quietly, unobtrusively blend into a space and be forgotten. Rarely have I seen a first time shooter with such a knack for becoming inconspicuous so easily and so precisely. While working on a story about the social and cultural divisions created through sectarian education programs that divide societies through its children, Saloni would keep coming back with images that surprised me with their intimacy. And they revealed a real photographer’s sensitivity and eye. And this from a student who had never shot before attending the workshop! Her first contact with an SLR was on the 3rd day of the workshop itself!
She was also perhaps one of the quietest students attending the workshop, rarely saying anything, but always observing. You could see that in the way she scanned a room when she walked in – a quality and skill that obviously served her well on what was a very difficult story to put together. With social tensions running high in the region, and her subjects sensitive to the intrusions of an outsider with a camera, Saloni had to negotiate a careful line while working with the religious schools and the community caught in the middle.
Here are a few samples from Saloni’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:
Copyright Saloni Bhojwani
Copyright Saloni Bhojwani
Copyright Saloni Bhojwani
Copyright Saloni Bhojwani
Copyright Saloni Bhojwani
Copyright Saloni Bhojwani
Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, On Photography, Photo Technique
In Photography, Photography Workshop on September 19, 2009 at 2:57 pm
It took only a few hours after her arrival in Ajmer for Elizabeth to realize that the story she had hoped to do did not exist. At least not within a reasonable distance from the city itself. Nearly 3 days of telephone calls to local journalists and discussions with other contacts in the city failed to provide a solution. I was concerned. Sara was concerned. I remember even some of the other students were concerned. Interestingly, Elizabeth was unfazed, and I found that rather troubling. She seemed very calm and composed through it all, and was in fact pursuing a quiet strategy – that of accompanying some of the other students to their meetings with local NGO and other institutions and keeping her eyes and ears open to something new. It was on the third day that I ran into an excited Elizabeth who approached me and said I have a story. My doubts were probably written all over my face, but Elizabeth was persistent and described what in fact was an intelligent, complex and fascinating story.
A small village on the outskirts of the city of Ajmer had had a new railway track constructed right through the middle of it. This had not only divided the village from its agricultural lands, but had also created fissures in its social and cultural fabric. The railroad meant that India’s modernity, with its conveniences and deprivations, had arrived right at its doorstep, imposing new values and new dreams amongst a younger generation of villagers more interested in careers, conveniences and the city life. As the elderly looked on, they traditional agricultural way of life now irrelevant, they could see that their village had become a smaller version of the broader changes taking place in today’s India.
Elizabeth had indeed found her story.
Here are a few samples from Elizabeth’s Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop story:
Copyright Elizabeth Herman
Copyright Elizabeth Herman
Copyright Elizabeth Herman
Copyright Elizabeth Herman
Copyright Elizabeth Herman
Aftermath/EXPOSURE Workshop, On Photography, Photo Technique
In Photography, Photography Workshop on September 19, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Her nervousness was palpable; sitting in the corridor late at night I watched her and her fear. For the last three days she had been exploring the lives of the Cheeta-Mewati community in the Beawar region of Rajasthan. A unique community that practiced a syncretic version of Hindu/Islamic spirituality, her project required her to examine the pressures the community had come under from the orthodox – both Hindu and Muslim, organizations that were fighting for their ’spiritual’ souls and attempting to seduce them towards a more purified spiritual place. Radhika Saraf is a first time photographer – a few days earlier I had been teaching her how to handle autofocus, and precisely why the camera meter behaves as it does.
Now, hours away from her first foray into this community, she was scared and I completely understood why. It was a fear that I had felt many times, and still do; the moment when the research, the planning, the imagination, and the ideas, are all set aside and the first step taken to actually enter a space and begin to explore a story. As Radhika, on that night, stood on that threshold of this moment and looked out across a world complex and unpredictable, she began to understand the difficulties of this craft that today is so easily dismissed as ‘dead’, and the tremendous creative and personal courage and clarity needed to begin, and create something out of what initially appears to be merely chaos and randomness.
A few samples from the Aftermath/EXPOSURE workshop follow:
The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf
The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf
The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf
The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf
The Cheeta-Mewati, Beawar Rajasthan: Copyright Radhika Saraf
