A photograph is a fallible record of a very specific encounter with a landscape. This fallibility is not tied to its material existence; instead it is evoked in the multiple interpretative possibilities that reside within it. Our preoccupation with photographs has always been mutual, and in thinking about photography, our conversations would often focus on what black and white photographs make possible – both for the photographer and the viewer. Drawn to bodies of photographic work that dwell on the dynamic of black and white, we realised that viewing a photograph can be thought of as an act that establishes a primordial ‘inconvenience’ – a sense of unease that sets in, a feeling of never being able to articulate the differences between what is seen, what is known, and what is felt. We began to concentrate on the specificity of such a feeling and the ways in which it could play out with regard to black and white photographs. Along with this, a compelling aspect of this ‘inconvenience’ that came to light was the instability that characterizes our responses to a photograph – prior associations and tangents affect an encounter with a photograph, allowing a Barthesian non-singularity of reaction.1
An Inconvenience of Knowledge and Reconciliation is our collaborative attempt to build a geography of readings and responses. It toys with the stimulative tendencies of black and white, and the absorptive capacities of acts of reading and responding to. Aligning two bodies of work and two processes, it also seeks to magnify the ways in which meaning-making complicates any triangulation of memory, association, affect, and imagination.
The first body of work consists of photographs from a series taken by Annalisa between 2016 and 2019 across Delhi and Rajgir. Titled Familiarity, these images depict a layered parlaying – a mnemonic conversation initiated with familiar and unfamiliar landscapes in the two cities. This series was born of two very physical and emotional shifts of space and place: Annalisa was triggered by the fact that she was changing houses, and at the same time, moving out of 21-year-long association with Delhi for her Master’s at Nalanda University in Bihar. Familiarity was initially stitched together with photographs taken during the process of shifting houses – black and white was an instinctive choice, and it brought out the starkness felt in overlapping ends and beginnings. However, as one space ceased to be called home, another began to reveal the possibility for new impressions. Leaving for Bihar soon after moving to the new house, Annalisa found herself faced with yet another unfamiliar, uncharted place that was rife with continuities that she could trace from her years in Delhi. Familiarity grew to acknowledge her relationship with both cities – the contrast of black and white a strong yet perfunctory binary within the frame of the photograph, accentuating the circumstances of the photograph but also blurring it.
A black and white photograph revokes the ‘truths’ accorded by colour, and allows the viewer to indulge themselves in the absence of such truths. Pairing these photographs was a process that contextualised implicit associations that Annalisa had not articulated before, and highlighted entanglements that were existing when the series was conceived of. She paired the images, keeping in mind the provocations she felt when she made them – drawing one image each from both cities in every set, the pairings were imagined as consciously-framed stimuli to respond to.
The untitled sequence of responses to these pairings forms the second body of work by Jaya. Keeping in mind Familiarity’s own ravelings within the ambit of memory and retrospection, her responses are graphic (re)visualisations envisaged while reading the photographs. The choice of a digital-graphic response was an organic decision for Jaya, having created an extensive database of digital brushes by scanning surfaces and textures. The intricate details of each brush are laden with a memory, a reminiscence of an encounter with a surface or a space, and this was a grounding factor in framing these responses.
Jaya was particularly responsive to markings or mark-like textures within the photographs, noticing the manner in which several of these were like layered imprints of realities. Toying with repetition and patterns with her brushes, she was focused on the ways in which she could respond to the landscapes framed in the photographs, and the emotions or memories they conjured. Thinking about landscapes led to reflecting upon boundaries, demarcations, notions of space and site, and the associations we form with the same. Through the use of her digital brushes, Jaya sought to respond to acts of visiting and re-visiting certain spaces and sites – in person and through our memories – often repeatedly and obsessively, creating embodied rituals of familiarity for ourselves. In order to map the very subliminal texture of such rituals, Jaya used the surface of her own hand in one instance, to re-emphasize the incredibly haptic primacy of her response.
These digital renderings are thus presented as a conscious, affective complication of the simplicity and stark clarity that is usually associated with the binary of black and white. Each response is an accumulation of multiple acts of encountering, responding, and (re)creating, while also dwelling on the interplay of memory and imagination.
Postscript: The use of a single haiku in every spread maps a visceral lexicon for each pair of photographs, and each was generated along the way. Though they were not central to the processes outlined above, we chose to include them as very simple emotional afterthoughts that may or may not specifically alter the primacy of the image-response dynamic, but remain as textual parallels to the feelings behind each pairing of photographs and the responses to them.
A – we are all thresholds to an infinity that we just do not see
B – they left stains in the winter sunlight, a sliver of possibility
C – emptiness fills old frames slowly, lingering like old lovers fading; (un)makings
D – faith undresses, and so does fact; we’re facing our fears today, naked
E – i see you four times over, the world replicates itself and shatters
F – my mother washes nine years off a floor, and with it divinity breaks
