portrait photography – Don't hold your breath

Portrait photography by Bryan Adams: Monday Art

Bryan Adams? Not the same one? Yes, the same. And in a less known role as a photographer. The banners outside Darmstadt’s museum promised photos of celebrities. A big part of the crowd inside admired the photos of people they already knew from movies and music, media social and media legacy. Corporate imagery blinds you until you see nothing else. I saw many people taking photos of the portraits. They are well done, but what can you see in another photo, no matter how well done, of the queen, Pink, or Ben Kingsley?

Interesting as these celebrity portraits are, I would have sleepwalked through the show if it was not for sections of photos of people who are not famous. This is what rescues the show from being by a celebrity about celebrities. There was a wall of faces of homeless people (the featured photo in this post) and several large portraits of people who were wounded in recent wars. These sections held less viewers. So I understand why a museum would advertise and lay it out the exhibition as this one did. The exhibition is touring, and you could consider catching it if you haven’t.

Subject, photographer

Glass is a photographer’s friend. At our hotel in Samdrup Jongkhar the lady who was taking care of our check in had left her children in another room behind glass doors. The youngest was distracted by all the comings and goings. Because of the location, I got a portrait which erases the otherwise rigid barrier between the photographer and the subject.

A face

Growing up in a different part of the country I knew this white cloth cap only as the Gandhi topi worn by politicians of a different era. After moving to Maharashtra I found that it is common across the countryside in this state as well as Gujarat. If you search online for traditional clothing of these states, though, the cap does not show up. Since most web sites showing traditional dress are fashion stores I wonder whether they are reliable. If you grew up in this side of the country then tell me your story of this cap. Spare a glance for the man modelling the cap. I met him on a dusty road in Solapur district.

Street photographers

Ambush photography is what I call the kind of street photography where you take photos of photographers. One of the ideas of street photography is to capture people at work. I find that the best results come when you see their emotions on their faces: concentration on work, the sizing up of customers, annoyance at being late, or even sheer boredom. When you get a street photographer at work you manage to catch concentration. These photos were taken at a street festival of art. In the header photo I thought the photographers were more interesting than the art.

Festivals and open air art exhibitions are good places to find many people with cameras. Ambushing them is an easy job: the hunter seldom expects to be hunted.

Things that cling

This has happened to you. Your mother fondly preserved something that you loved when you were a child. But you have no memory of it. The mind is fickle, as Krishna tells Arjuna on the eve of a battle with his family. Favourites come and go. Things and memories that cling to you today, move you desperately, will be forgotten tomorrow. So I looked through photos that I have shown before to recreate a memory archaeologist’s view of what my favourites had been once. The featured photo of a black buck seeking a mate was once among my favourites.

So was this portrait of a fruit seller in Munnar’s municipal market. The reflection of the harsh sunlight outside the stall gave ample light inside, and the blue plastic covering his stall cast its colour over the scene. The double portrait, the man with the red eyes and his reflection looking older, was something that came to me in a moment.

I’d taken a long walk with my camera around the mangrove forest on one shore of Neil Island in the Andamans, When I got back. my companions had sat down for an al fresco lunch. As I joined them, my attention fell on our surroundings reflected in the spoon in front of me: the walls of the restaurant on one side, the open sea and the mangroves on the other. The curves of the spoon made an abstract of the reflections, and the whole became, for a while, a favourite still life.

On a walk through the lanes of Bandra village one evening, the week before Christmas, I passed this little shop selling kababs. They had nearly sold out their stock, and these four young counter staff were clearly waiting for a signal to down shutters. There was a lot happening around them, and I could sense their impatience to get away. This was the best street photo I got that day: none of the lights, but a sense of expectation. Isn’t that what you want for a Christmas shot?

At Checkpoint Charlie the atmosphere these days is of a carnival. Tourists walk about gawking at the remnants of a history which passed before they were born. How could I capture the sense of that past history which loomed over most of my youth? A blank wall and the shadow of a guard’s pillbox might do. These five were my favourites once, made with thought. All these I’d forgotten, and I now remember.

Rods and cones

Rods and cones. That’s how we see. When we open our eyes in the dark, the rods in our retinae pick up the incoming photons and their associated neurons build a picture of the world for us: in black and white. When there’s more light the cones attached to the retinae become active, and allow us to see colour. The business of there being three primary colours has to do with the fact that we have three kinds of cones, each activated by a range of colours around the “primaries”. That means of course that some shrimps see in 16 primary colours, and most birds in four. Our TV screens will look dull to these animals.

It is in this context that I take the idea of looking at the same image in both colour and black and white. An octopus famously has no colour receptors in its eyes at all. Would a mantis shrimp perceive the same image from the black and white version of the above photo as an octopus does? I have no idea. But I do know that in both versions of this photo that I took at a Japanese Shinto marriage ceremony, everyone will know immediately which of the two fathers is the bride’s.

I also wanted to experiment with transforming a high key photo to black and white. The original was taken in the ruins of Otrar, razed by Genghis Khan in one his earliest atrocities. I really do prefer the black and white version here because to my eyes the butterfly stands out more clearly. What is your take on it? Which do you prefer? And more importantly, why?

This photo of the Annapurna range from an aircraft started life as a high key colour photo. In fact in such a high key that I could not see the details. A little tweak brought out the early afternoon’s shadows in the colour version; so the details were there all right. A conversion to black and white which preserves the luminosity (top row right) did not add any detail, as you can see. Of these two I prefer the colour version, because I like my cones more. Interestingly, if I’d mapped the hue to the brightness (lower row left) then I go a very high key B&W photo.

The most interesting experiment is the last photo. If you try to gauge the response of the eye’s rods to different colours, then you see that it is insensitive to red. That is the science behind the title of David Diop’s famous novel, “At night all blood is black.” I tried to model this by draining the colour photo of its red hue by tweaking the channel mixer, and then transforming to black and white. Except for a difference in exposure, you see it is almost the same as the original desaturation. I think the clouds are more interesting in this version, but not much else has changed.

Favourite photos of the year 405 ME

When you see a blade of grass folded over, there must be a reason for that. When you see a leaf folded down, there has to be a reason why it is so. The world is cause and effect. Our brains evolved to reason about the cause from the effect.

At 7:30 in the morning the day’s first round of work is done, and these two labourers can take a break with a small cup of strong and sweet tea. The wholesale flower market where they had unloaded trucks are about to close. Florists from across Kolkata had bought their flowers. The retailers will soon be ready with their bouquets and garlands in time for the morning rituals of the middle class.

A tiny bouquet of flowers seems to float free over the undergrowth. In the rain-swept upper reaches of the Western ghats most plants hunker close to the ground, but they send up flower-bearing stems where the wind can call on insects to come and pollinate them.

It is hard to get a young nephew to stand still for a portrait unless you promise him a photo like he has never seen before.

You don’t often have an opportunity to take photos of a robbery in progress. This monsoon I frequented a fishing dockyard and got some street photos full of action. The mere fact that we stockpile food changes the world around us in so many ways. Wild animals like these little herons (Egretta garzetta) gulls, terns, other herons, and other waders come into the docks and become raiders that feed on what humans have taken from their hunting grounds. I’ve seen birds chase trucks loaded with fish, or raid them as they stop at traffic lights. Our market places are the battle grounds of human-animal conflict.

The funniest photo of the year is perhaps this one of a pond heron (Ardeola greyii) going cross eyed in order to gauge the distance to a small Scarlet Marsh Hawk dragonfly (Aethriamanta brevipennis). I’m glad to report that the plucky little dragonfly got away. At least, this time.

What is 405 ME?

The Lens-Artists Team: Anne, Anne-Christine, Egidio, John, Patti, Ritva, Sofia, Tina

Faces of Mumbai

Faces of Kolkata

City life is street life. Little traders, daily-wage labour, taxi drivers, these are the people whose trades are plied on streets. You’ll see them in every city. But in Kolkata jobs have not yet been atomized, so each trader will package his wares himself. The daily-wager will relax after three hours of hard labour with a tea. There is a small secondary economy: people to serve food to those who work on the streets, cobblers to repair the shoes worn out on roads.

I found it interesting to be a tourist in Kolkata, walking about with my phone, taking photos of people at work, or at rest after work.

Secret city

Every city is an union of the circuits and neighbourhoods of a million people. Each person’s view of the city is a hidden city inside the city on the map. Here is my secret city. Like all of them, it starts at home. And like all homes, it has different moods. If I were to select one of them to represent home, it will be with people and their smiles. The featured photo is the center of my city.

Grand architecture and traffic are another staple of a city. But I seldom look at the architecture when I’m in a hurry. Here, stuck in a little traffic snarl, I noticed the reflection of an Indo-Saracenic facade in the window of a nearby taxi. There you have it: people busy in their daily lives, no eyes for the grandeur around them.

The Marathon is a time when everyone seems to run for a cause. For some it is the race, for others a hobby. But there are many causes showcased on such days: anything from school lunches to tiger conservation. And, of course, pride.

My city has secret gardens. Here is an intimate view of our private balcony garden. It is always open to birds and insects. We went to a lot of trouble coordinating the watering of plants while we travelled. It is not so bad when you are away for a few days, but being away for a few weeks calls for drastic management. We took to keeping many of the plants in planters, and moving them out of the flat when we were away. A helpful gardener would then take care of them, and bring them back later.

A city is constantly in renewal. I liked this guard keeping an eye on a building under renovation. It is the most relaxed years of his job: just making sure that no squatters enter while the interior is being done.

Then there are the other residents of the city. This one is a regular visitor. A pair of gray hornbills visit our neighbourhood every winter, raise a brood and leave by April. They had a favourite nesting site near a window till the tree fell over in a monsoon storm several years ago. Now they have found another tree with an appropriate hole a little further off. So many interlocking views, so many neighbourhoods!