Behind The Cover
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I’ve often observed a certain solidarity in all of my favourite photographs. I had a sense of direction for them, seconds before I even took them. It’s almost as though the right picture, it does all the work for itself. Dorothea Lange, a Great Depression era photographer said, “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still”. She clicked ‘The Migrant Mother’, perhaps one of the most celebrated photographs of all time. Well, those stills of time, they’ve taken my life to unimaginable places; ones I’d always remember fondly.
This photograph can be as simple as a still of a vendor in a weekly market, on the surface of it. For me, this picture juxtaposes the vibrancy of juvenescence and it’s simplicity, with the mundane hustle of adulthood. It’s that ever - preserved glow from our early years; how mere wood, paper and wind could square happiness. For that vibrancy and creative nostalgia, I used a post - production technique called ‘Colour Splashing’, saturating only a part of the photograph and keeping the rest desaturated. In ties with that, ‘Local Flavour’ represents the cultural niches and intricacies that we lean into, plant down and grow up on. Pinwheels and paper boats, that’s nostalgia for me. It’s the pain from an old wound, as the Greek tradition reads, and far more powerful than a memory.
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