We are talking here of the Big Picture in photography, exactly as we tend to talk about it in our poetry:

Big picture

This time I look down from my balcony
And see men ,women and dogs and trees
Pushcarts of knickknacks, bright sunshine,
Colored plastic bags flying , broken toys
And left out laughter of playing little girls
On the erased street art of watchman’s wife

I recall scraps of yesterday’s night-smells
That contained vaguely lying dog-forms
White tarpaulin veils of the sleeping cars
And a faint glimmer of a dark night’s stars
The street wore on a splendid night shirt.

I also see a bald pate of old man smoking
Bidi into a sun-shine world of shadows
Its smoke curls emerge from behind closed
Eye-holes , directly from hunger thoughts .

I recall other days of jasmine strings lying
Curled up in a basket on an old man’s head
Of white mustache , at two rupees an inch.
I smell smells of fried onion and bread crust
From houses that cooked in a world below.

I still feel sounds of trash van spluttering
From smoke from its tail, its stinking smell
Rising to the heavens, its driver laughing
At the remembered jokes of its trash man
Walking behind with plastic bins of smell.

I recall days of rain, pearl-drops from roof
Kids playing in wet roads, cars awash with sun
From behind white clouds, emptied of rain
Puddles of frogs that would turn carcasses
In next day’s morning’s walk, in rain-smells.

I recall the bonfires of watchmen and kids
In the road, their white smoke hitting the tree
That supplied twigs that were once the tree
Their fires slowly warming little winter palms.

This time round I look down from my balcony
That is where I manage to get my big picture.

Big picture here is in a metaphorical sense,but not in the way of a larger-than-life. Here we assume a position of vantage like the top management of a company which does not micro-manage but has an idea of how the company is going. A larger-than-life involves exaggeration ,a sense of heightening so as to get to the truth. In Big Picture here you see men, creatures and things as mere aggregates, only an idea that takes you forward in the achievement of beauty. Beauty, not truth.

I make a story, not of men, not of faces, nor of thoughts. I merely tell about a space in time, a shifting space in a moment of time. A spatial consciousness, an awareness of space that links the participants in the space to aggregate space. A paradigm.

A higher place where I stand , for example ,on a balcony to capture life’s underlying nuances in the street. A mountain top from where I see ants of men crawling about in the plains, among fields and rivers, buffaloes standing as tiny specs on hot river beds, crowds of people lying huddled in closed places like temples and mosques and squares and all of them sharing a space together. All of them saying something together. A window is my vantage from which I see the vast expanses of grass ,trees ,paddy fields ,birds, furloughing bullocks, endless mud tracks,blue mountains disappearing in the horizon. The house window is my vantage from behind its rusty iron bars. The train window is my vantage for creatures and things that will go up and down in a space of telephone wires. A furiously moving merry-go-round is my vantage for looking down on quickly disappearing people and objects.

 
Some times I reach the rocky wilderness that lay beyond the streets,
To see sun-smelling rocks, and shrubs that make the other world
That seemed to exist beyond the banality of our daily existence
I click for strange frames in which rocks, shrubs and men co-exist.
My eye-frame brings strange bed-fellows into a plane of existence.

 
I click to understand colors, to understand shapes, not for pictures,
Not totalities of a beauty vision formed by well-thought motifs.
I click for strange ways in which rock merges in light with dead trees,
For the shared consciousness of rocks, trees and people, machines
Caught in a single frame encompassing these and several elements.
I click for the chemistry that binds the sun, the rocks, and the shrubs
With bits of blue sky that exist with them, glued to them on the top.

In people photography I find it convenient to choose busy market places especially the crowded markets found in all Indian cities for capturing the poetry behind the activities of so many people who share the spacial consciousness of a moment.A never ending dialogue takes place in the shops linking humans in a complex web of transactions. A photograph captures the drama of human actions beautifully  . These dialogues never seem to end as though everything that is being said remains frozen in time .For a while these figures become immortalized not because they are caught in a digital picture (which in any case is as ephemeral as human life) but because they remain as ideas hanging out open-ended in the time-space continuum.The open-endedness of the duologue is delicious when it becomes a part of the shared consciousness.

The season between winter and summer is a season of dreams .The dreariest place in the city appears as though it has been decked up for the coming spring.I  keep telling my wife who accompanies me in my morning walks that she must notice the beauty and be aware of the beauty as we pass the trees which are unusually green and some times in brown and red  and of different hues. She no doubt appreciates   my drawing her attention to it from time to time but  do I have to do it all the time ? Why not talk about this and that  ?   Possibly  I look at everything as though I am readying myself to photograph it. The perfectly ordinary things in life appear to me as if they are endowed with extraordinary beauty .This is because digital photography has heightened my visual sense enough to enable me to look at everything in a different light.I mean light literally because that is what my eyes keep adjusting automatically whenever I see something interesting and photographable.

I never realized till today morning that this extraordinary benefit had accrued to me possibly due to my three years of continuous photography in different situations.The pleasures of collecting beauty tokens from different places and situations make your life worth living.Photography heightens your senses and develops and fine tunes your faculties.It is not necessary that whatever we think is beautiful and gives us joy  automatically qualifies to be photographed.It is just the perspective that you have developed that enables you to enjoy life.

Photoediting enabled by digital photography gives you a lot of freedom to make your photographs look the way you want them. I have always preferred to add a certain dreaminess or some amount of wistfulness to the photograph  by manipulating and downplaying light and colour . But the possibility has to be invariably thought of in composition and later , supported by the editing software. The beauty of a perfectly ordinary looking object can be several times enhanced through the use of  soft sunlight .

 

Some times a photograph can be used effectively to define the character of a place or ethos.Obviously such a picture will have disparate elements somehow fusing together to convey the overall character of a place or scene.We come back to the old premise-a picture manages to integrate several elements that share a common spatial consciousness which is tied to a particular chunk of time. The character of the scene is defined by the way the elements fuse together to convey a single unified impression.

In the above  photograph ,taken from the   timesonline.uk.com  archives,one can experience the  defining character of the coalmines premises on a wet afternoon .The defining character is of course the mind-numbing dreariness of the place which can be experienced easily although the scene is from a place far removed from us in space and time.

 

 

One of the most powerful techniques used in poetry and drama is the use of irony,called dramatic irony.The dramatic irony emanates in drama, out of the interplay of the actions of characters as they unfold.The Greek tragedies are good examples. Shakespeare's plays use the technique effectively .The irony unfolds as the characters move inexorably towards their fates .In photography the use of dramatic irony is not feasible as the photograph deals with a single spatial situation and a juxtaposition of several situations in different points of time is not possible. But a photograph can still employ a plain type of irony with equal effectiveness.
I have come across a beautiful photograph in the BBC's daily news in pictures.

A man is dead and he was a pauper and it is necessary to raise money for his funeral.And what do the neighbours do raise the money ? They play cards while perhaps keeping all-night vigil near the dead man's casket. Death is serious business and in order to deal with it one has to deal a pack of playing cards !Delicious irony.

The vastness of canvas available in a digital photograph adds a new
dimension to appreciation of the beauty of nature in two ways :Firstly
the photograph releases you from the limits of your own awareness of
the environment . Secondly the digital phototograph explores the
interrelationship between the different components of the picture
which play on one another in a most symbiotic fashion . It is as
though the tree , the grass, the lake , the paddy fields , the sky and
the clouds are singing in a chorus of joyful melody. The individual
components add up to the totality of the beauty in a manner that does
not happen in the real world . Thus there is no rice field without the
mountains, the sky, the bush, the mud track, the palm trees and the
sunlight; there is no moon without the customary coconut tree. Many
times we are unable to appreciate the beauty inherent in a natural
scene because our senses cannot focus enough on the essential nature
of things , the luminiscence that emerges from the objects of nature
acting on one another.

Digital photography expands our consciousness pushing the borders of
visual awareness like nothing else does. More particularly vast spaces
captured in panoramic views . Normally we have only a fleeting glimpse
of expanded horizons when we are on the move , that is when we are
travelling by a car and we stop by on the highway . The spaces release
us from our own limits of visual awareness . We have seen such vast
spaces only in paintings. For the first time , after the advent of
digital photography we are in a position to capture such vast spaces.

After five years of photography and a lot of thinking about it I begin to ask myself the most basic question:  What do I actually photograph? I do not photograph objects but actually the light that that falls on them.That is why I prefer to photograph objects in dusk or dawn light .because I love to capture light as it falls on objects ,more particularly when a soft light of dawn or twilight falls on them.

The subjects do not really matter .Even the most banal of objects can turn out to be an object of beauty in light or in shades of light.When we mean light we also mean partial lack of it and shadows. The filtered daylight that enters through the window some times transforms the most commonplace object into a visual treat.Here again it is not the object that becomes photograph-worthy but the light that falls on it. Watching dusk light as it works its magic on  roads,houses ,streets and people is the most agreeable of  visual sensations to the eye. Photographing it accentuates the pleasure..