In the last couple of months, I have had a difficult time writing about my photographs. It should be simple right? but I have come to realise that it isn’t.My photographic practice which everyone calls as my “Work” revolves around Lodhi Garden in Delhi and the landscape that Bir has to offer along with objects that usually gets ignored by most of us in our day to day lives. I have been meaning to write about my work for a long time now and each time I try, for some reason, it never resonates with me. The problem isn’t that its not complete, but the problem somewhere lies in my ethics of how it should be interpreted. See, my images are very simple in nature and somewhere I find it difficult to write beyond the fact that these are all taken to counter loneliness in a city or the feeling of content in the hills. These are two very seperate feelings that I feel when I make these pictures but somewhere they are aligned for me. I’m not a writer but I really want to be one. Sometimes when I see and experience something magical, I immediately get annoyed because my vocabulary only allows me to say “its so beautiful” I'm sick of the limitations that I carry but I’m also too lazy to do anything about it. In two thousand nineteen, my photographs of lodhi garden that I took to battle depression started to make sense to me. I named the series, Lonely..Together and that was it you know? I was really lonely and going around that garden almost everyday and taking photos of the trees somewhere made me feel okay about life and gave me some sense of belonging, that was all I needed and this is all I could think of that project which has now revolved into a bigger which consists of my relationship with a public park and how I feel a very strong emotional connection with the landscape that surrounds the park.
I keep switching between two very different feelings about this situation. I want to write about this because sometimes its important for me to tell you that in the exact moment when I took the first photo, I thought of the rose as a sign of love which I felt that I had been really away from and also felt that I don’t deserve it…and the very next moment I saw the other rose a little further away from it and for me that was the sign that one day I will not feel this way and that is when I took the other photo with both the roses.The other feeling is that why should I tell you this? let this be a empty space for you to think and tell me what do you feel about this photograph? It is a battle that I fight almost everyday and I hope for some resolution somewhere down the horizon. (I have attached an audio of me reading the newsletter, if this is something you want me to continue, please let me know)
here’s a song for the weekend -
love,tijbed.
