BOOK: Object looking outwards, at Us: HARUKO
Object looking outwards, at Us:
Imaging the world through the Frame of an Object
(I)
A Chaotic Order:
Haruko’s photo-book is a collection of images, shot with a digital camera, placed ‘against’ each other in a book form, of which the current write-up is a part.
The notion of book as a ‘museum-without-walls’ (Andréa Malraux) or ‘another way of telling’ (John Berger) might suggest the known models of perceiving these kind of images, initially. However, there is a difference. Bound by the book format, the photographs are ‘placed’ on the left and right side, which already creates a kind of hierarchy of ‘looking’ and ‘comparing’ in a Euro-centric sense.
Let us start reading the book: In Haruko’s book, the ‘memory’ of the images we just saw always bars us from looking at the current photo as a self-complete image.
Haruko is aware of this and even ‘imposes’ it to a certain extent due to the way he ‘deliberates’ two mutually facing photographs. There is a connection that teasingly refutes easy formal comparisions in between (ex: the relief of a shoe-sole next to a sculptural model of the brain. Both look similar, but the material softness of the brain ‘against’ the solidity of the sole is intended). Layers of memory settle down upon our act of looking, resulting in an experience, which forms a palimpsest of a metaphoric kind. Interestingly the pictures facing each other refuse to comfortably co-exist! ‘Memory’ is the first and foremost aspect that looses out its clarity due to the number of photographs, which exceeds the normal human grasping capacity. Since each photo is a twin-photograph (as the artist wishes it to be), these photos suggest us four possible models to grasp the difficulty of perceiving them:
(a) Each photograph cannot be considered as an independent image
(Ex: the photo of film heroes and Gods are already existing images, clicked for a re-intervention. The ‘heroism-of-Gods’ and the ‘godliness-of-the-heroes’ are readymade definitions existing out there, even before the images have been captured!)
(b) Two facing-photos in the book need not be the two best twin images for mutual comparision.
(Even during the working process of this book, there were innumerable reshuffling and permutations and combinations tried out between images of various kinds, which usually doesn’t happen with an ordinary photo-show. The image of the sacred shiva-lingam against a commode or a rocket (for a formal similarity) might have been a mere working comparision, which was never finalized)
(c) It is possible to take suggestions from each twin-photograph to commix any portion of any paired-photos and pair it up with another image from yet an other paired-images, always.
(A single snap itself might contain a double view as it happens with an advertisement covering the left half of a picture with a petty shop to the right. When placed with another visual, there will be three images for mutual interaction, in such cases, that bars you from following a uniformity of comparing any two)
(d) Thus each cross-connection between different pairs results in an ‘always alterable condition’. Along with construing a new pair of relation, every time such a cross connection occurs, two intended pairs are discarded of their already existing experiential definition!
(The image of an old, fragile squatting man extending his hand towards the close-up of a heap of coins hastens to define him as a beggar. The peeled off surface of a wall might have become the best imagery for poverty but in this case, it is compared with the ‘act of puncturing a visual’, suggesting a deeper, different possibility of reading. A ‘known form’ need not always adhere to the ‘known possible meaning’ they evoke.)
While looking at any one photo-page, one cannot ‘remember’ the previous page due to the feel that there are too many pages, behind and beyond. The mind often combines two visuals that don’t match with the actual twin photos, as an after thought. The detail of any/each photo is forgotten more easily due to this excess. This gestalt is deliberate. Let us presume that this is a ‘horizontal challenge’ posed. While trying to do that, there is the strength of each individual photo, objects within and the arrangement around it that shrieks out for attention. Let us presume this to be a vertical challenge. It is humanly impossible to involve both such horizontal and vertical challenges together in the act of perceiving works of art. (Similar to the literally doubly-split hero in one of Italo Calvino’s story). It would be a real challenge to imagine our world, as visible to those doubles!
Now, after their reorientation as art-imagery, the aged objects look young. That is how we can look at the same old, unattractive, dull moments around them (a) as new and (b) as imagery and situation around the objects that we had not realized earlier. In other words, the old object coming with new ‘imagery’ and ‘situation’ gives a different meaning to the same old object.
All the above-mentioned processes occur simultaneously. With every viewership, a photograph projects four varieties (at least) of narratives. It refuses the idea of ‘one image per photograph’. When a frame (i.e., a photo) is thus deleted off its conventional meaning as an ‘image’, the notion of image itself is at stake. Thus in Haruko’s photographs, each pair of photos form an image, each photograph itself can be an image, the object inside some photos themselves are images (because they are secondary and tertiary realities like a watchman holding his photograph within which he himself is holding the photograph of himself). When a picture is ‘being’, ‘forming’ and ‘becoming’ an image, it is no more an image, for it permanently looses its meaning as a ‘noun’ and becomes a ‘verb’. It looses its realistic frame. This is how memory evolves to become a memory of another kind in Haruko’s photographs: the true essence of memory lies in the fact that it (the image) should not be enabled to return with all its exactitude, for the second time!
(II)
The Object:
Most of these photos were chosen from the streets or walls. There are hardly any visuals from the ceilings or interiors. Often, some close-ups refute the reality of the past two sentences. The camera can be said to be “bogged down” by a sense of gravity of the land. What is seen above the horizon line is nature while that below it constitutes a culture. The one thing that connects all those ‘objects’ inside such photographs is that they are/were mostly aged. Majority of these objects ‘were’ functional once upon a time (from centuries old temple pillar to a year old kitschy pop-calendar). Man-made objects, which are functionally exhausted, yet persist to exist, like aged cows, in a geographic location like that of India. The reader can sense the deliberate attempt to avoid that theoretic talk about post colonialism for it has little to do in the context here: all these objects are those that can be found anywhere, everywhere. However, there are two aspects that are specifically Indian about these objects:
(a) The lived experience of these objects are unique to this place, for Indians associate multipurpose meanings to every functional objects (a stone becomes a God, a torn poster becomes base to the next one, a tap serves as the ideal place to be painted with the left over blue wall paint), and
(b) Even the dead and evil co-exist with the living world. The moment they are captured by the camera, the object is pushed to a ‘past’ (Barthe’s notion of a photo as an equivalent to the dead) and as it is, the object might have had functionally belonged to yet another ‘past’. There are several images of the same object, several pasts to each object and a past, present and future exists to each image (as explained in the previous paragraph). In other words, there are several images to each object, several layers of experience hidden in each image. It depends on whether we are ready to receive them. It is so because the geographic location (India) from wherein these objects emerge is a land of both visual exuberance as well as visual illiteracy!)
The advantage for those who are not brought up in such a situation- like Haruko- is that they can see the way the aged objects yearn to re-live again and again, though not functionally. It is so due to the way they are shot, arranged, presented and reminded! A simple snap of a commonplace object is something that the audience would not have had expected and hence are the ones that he/she comes to adore (both at the same).
(III)
The Image:
The images ‘within’ a photograph and a photo itself as ‘imagery’ are two different aspects. Often, in these images, the photograph and objects ‘within’ cannot be differentiated. It is so because the perception of all these three faculties (images, photo and objects) does not mutually differ. Further, Haruko’s photos do not intend to speak about the ‘subject within’ but about the very process of photo-images becoming subjects of contemplation.
The frames of the object and photo exchange roles, not because of the way they ‘are’ but due to the way we are given to ‘perceive’ them. All the ‘chosen’ objects are promoted to the level of getting ‘framed’—a step from the streets towards the museum. This is the true skeletal structure of the photo-book. If at all each of these objects could speak about the human drama that occurred around them in the best part of their life! Interestingly, the objects live longer than humans in the so-called third world countries!
(IV)
Objects are the images that we see:
These excess of objects ‘erase’ a heroic narrative grasp of singular objects. The excess imagery of objects also means ‘disintegration of any sort of singularity’—a modern day crisis that is a result of, and has led to the way we deal with ‘browsing’ TV channels, radio stations, magazines and the kind on a busy day, which means almost every day. The contemporary situation of an object depends on how much of attention we can pay towards them. As these photos prove, the more and more is the number of objects and images around us, the less and less do we realize about each one of them. As it is, this photo-book, as an installation of ideas, exactly tell this!
The book as a set of images, the images as a collection of photos, the photos as an assemblage of found objects and the objects as containers of a recorded past life are not antiques or monuments and being inside these photo-book is not like being inside a museum. These objects, perhaps, form un-heroic middle-class equivalents of the antiques. They don’t form an anomaly but ‘are the’ (before being shot) building blocks of Indian middle class environment. Ideally speaking, they are ‘ready’ for disintegration—a commode, a machine, a poster and the like. Factually speaking, ‘the very disintegrating process itself’ is a permanent contemporary state of being an Indian object! Being (shot) outdoors and on the ground, they are dislocated from their actual semi-functional space. When they become a part of the book, they achieve a sense of lightness, from the ground and walls to the hands. However, they don’t go away as mementos of lived moments into a different country, when they travel. Here are objects—after being photographed and before that—that looked familiar to Haruko, as images. The captured visuals’ actual biodata is deeply hidden within the memory of each object’s memory. These days, objects are not bound by nationalities–owing to the tradition of Diaspora. Our senses’ ability is ‘the’ overall reality of objects that we grasp. There is no object or world for us, beyond our perceptual ability. This is an old Kantian truth. But the current point of argument lies in the uniformity of this set of objects that can not be perceived uniformly. Again, Kant says that we just cannot know the object in its totality until we become ‘that’. Are these the very kind of objects that we have had lived with? Haruko’s photos might be suggesting this very impossibility through a few possible human steps.///