A meditation on photographs-2
Song of the road!
I think the image has been aptly titled as the song of the road.
When You listen to a good piece of music and if you love it, you love it. You don’t try to rationalize why a specific note on the piano was played after the high pitched violin, you just submit yourself to the sounds and it takes you on a journey.
I think that’s the case with this image.
I think that’s the case with all the good art.
The moment I saw it, I didn’t try to read it or draw conclusions out of this image. I was awed by the beauty, the silver on the road, a tree straight out of a gothic story, and a farmer walking by. In the background, some kids are riding a bicycle and in extreme depth, giant trees stand like ghostly figures.
The wide frame allows your eyes to move from right to left, from left to right, and from front back and back to front.
The frame intrigues me maybe because you can find so much meaning in emptiness and stillness here that it almost feels like fantasy, a bold black, and white fantasy never ever imagined before. The bright silver tones overlapped by the tall dark figures standing in never-ending vastness invites you to jump inside the frame.
There is a very subtle rhythm to this image that hides behind the spontaneity of the moment.
The road that emerges from one corner and disappears somewhere into the distance, nearby those Nilgiris.
The thin branches of the tree rise high in the sky like veins in the human body and the man walking by.
The smartly chosen low angle highlights the pedestrian in silhouette in spite of seemingly dark barren lands.
The shades of black in the foreground and the grey in-depth balance the entire composition.
The photographer has seamlessly hidden his craft in the simple minimalistic approach while capturing this image. There is no loudness in is the point of view as if he just wanted to tell a story by clicking an image. That’s it. But look closely, he has said a lot of things in silence and it’s not even necessary for an artist to be always conscious of the statement that his art will reflect or the question that he will ask through his art. It’s up to us…the viewer, the readers, the listeners to seek an extension of the art, interpret infinite meanings out it, deny it, and evolve with those meanings. The never-ending evolution always helps you see things in a new light, with a different ever-changing perspective.
The minimal approach in the composition makes it look like an antithesis to a wide-angle photograph of urban landscapes, cursed with ever-growing noises and sky scrappers. In cities, we all turn into those characters who try so damn hard to feel the quietness and stillness of nature, and here in this image, the place looks devoid of unnecessary sounds. In fact, the silence is so deafening that the characters here would play noisy music on their cheap speakers. The migration of unemployed young boys to cities, the hunger and poverty, years of drought, the apathy of the government has left the villages with no option but to grieve in a very unfortunate way, the way mother grieves for her missing child.
This image seems to be taken out of modern folklore where a farmer keeps walking because of a strange dream. He had a vision that if he would not start walking tomorrow morning, the crops of the fellow farmers will suffer. There will be a drought. This village will be cursed, There will be no water but surely there will be a meager compensation from the government, which will take years to materialize.
The next morning He starts walking, He walks, He walks and he walks, crosses villages, crosses cities. He does non stop for a second or else his village will suffer. After covering thousands of miles on foot, When he was about to step into the sea. He wished to see his own land, his own family, his village.
He takes a u-turn and walks for another thousand miles. He feels thirsty, hungry, and exhausted. But now he can see his village, his wife toiling herself away in the harsh sun, his children playing nearby. He smiles and as he is about to take a mouthful of water from a pond, he drops dead. Just like that.
How fascinating it is to document reality as some kind of fantasy!
(check out Ankur’s work on Instagram, the link to his Instagram profile is embedded in the caption and if you like his work, do share it with your friends or…may be hire him. He is an outstanding fashion photographer as well )
his Behance profile: Ankur Dabhade
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