1. What is your earliest memory of how or what attracted you to photography?
It was a photograph of my parents from their wedding album. While the entire album was in B/W, there was this one photograph, which was in color. I think I was around 5 or 6 when I saw it for the first time. It held a certain fascination for me for a long time, as it was hand painted, not that I knew this at the time. The colors were very bright and seemed quite different from the color photographs that I was used to seeing. I quite distinctly remember feeling that both my parents looked the best in that photo because of those colors. And then there were these two large photos of my grandparents, which were framed after they had passed away. These were also in color. By the time we had them in the house, I was in my early teens and I could clearly make out that they had been hand painted after the initial print had been made. These are my first distinct memories and associations with photography.
2. Did you study photography formally in a college or university? If so, what was your experience? If not, how did you inform yourself about the medium – the techniques, the language and the aesthetics of it?
It was 1994, and I had just completed a terribly expensive course at LASALLE Singapore called Visual Merchandising and had this very clear realization that I wasn’t going to pursue a career in that field. I was standing on the street, just looking around, totally clueless as to what I was going to do with my life in terms of making a career upon my return to Delhi, when I saw a camera store. I walked in and told the guy that I wanted to become a photographer. On his advice, I bought myself a Nikon FM2.
When I got back to Delhi, I spent a lot of time on the streets getting comfortable with my FM2. Being in the streets and interacting with people came naturally. I traveled by train and bus to nearby towns, and it was on these journeys that I experienced a life that was different from what I had lived. The life out there that I was seeing informed the way I looked through the camera. That shaped my aesthetics and informed my practice.
Everything that came before picking up the camera informed my eye and the way I thought and looked. My formative years were spent in the motel that my parents ran in the U.S., where I was exposed to all kinds of visitors, some of whom stayed for short periods and others for longer, which had an influence on me. Perhaps that’s why, thirty years later, I worked on a series that I titled The Visitor. Coming back to India, on our many visits to my father’s hometown, wanting to spend lazy afternoons playing in the village lanes, I was instead exposed to deep-rooted Marwari traditions and biases, which left their mark. Later, my teen years are best represented by Dayanita Singh’s image of the girl in her school dress, lying in bed, when I so wanted to shut the world away. Studying English Literature and doing theatre at college led my mind to think in another, new direction and sowed the seeds of activism. I believe that all this, and much more, informed my photographic practice in terms of technique and aesthetics.
3. Do you think it is important to receive a formal training in photography?
Yes and no.
It depends entirely on who the individual is. Some of us need a formal environment to learn and focus and some of us have the rigor and the drive to self learn, inform, educate, and hone skills. In either case, it is important to have a certain critical view, especially of your own work.
4. If you were to design a photo program for young Indian photographers, what would it look like? Would it be a degree course? Workshop format? Mentorships?
It would be a combination of all the above.
However, the course would begin with an independent, compulsory 3 months dedicated travel by train or bus by each student. On this travel, the students would be allowed to make photographs using only an analog camera and to come back with a maximum of 3 rolls of exposed film.
In order to make work that is relevant, I feel it is imperative for a photographer to have life experiences to draw from. Also, the photographer needs to have the discipline to rely completely on her/his skills to make the image and not merely on great technology wherein the camera makes the photograph and not the photographer.
5. Who or what has inspired you to pursue photography and/or continues to do so?
Photography itself.
Photography for me is therapeutic. I use it to address personal issues and concerns. I use it to address stuff that bothers and even infuriates me. This makes me continue with photography.
6. Is there a book, exhibition or body of work that has really impressed you and maybe influenced your work / life?
My cousin was an actor with the theatre group Chingari, which was quite active in the ’80s. Perhaps, seeing them all perform in those rather abstract – even absurd – plays, while I was at an impressionable age was an influence. Writings of Jean Genet and Becket’s Waiting for Godot certainly had an impact. I am sure these impressions have found expression in my works.
7. What draws / drew you to the subject matter you are pursuing in your current work?
All my photographic work stems from personal experiences and is a response to the reality around me. I photograph only when I feel a compelling need to do so and feel consumed by that need. I use photography to deal with my fears and issues that really disturb me. Memory plays a huge role. Research too, as a follow up.
For instance, one of the first people I started photographing was Munna Guru, a hijra, who I feared while I was growing up. She lived a few houses down from my grandmother’s house, and since I was quite naughty, I was often threatened that I would be sent there. As a result, I grew up in fear of her. So, when I picked up the camera in 1995, she was one of the first people I began photographing. The memory of witnessing my favorite 29-year-old widowed aunt, clad in a white sari was deeply traumatic. I was twelve years old at that time. This memory led me to Vrindavan to photograph the widows living in the ashrams there. My work with people living in mental health institutions was an attempt to deal with my guilt for not being able to help a cousin who was suffering from severe mental health issues while we were growing up.
The knowledge that a dear friend received a positive diagnosis in 2000 led to my work on HIV+ people. My work on Kashmir began in 2016, in collaboration with my partner who is from Srinagar. It was a reaction to the experience of having been caught in a complete lockdown in Srinagar for 2 weeks. We live in Delhi, 90 minutes from Srinagar by air, and this complete lockdown made us acutely aware of the freedom we take for granted. The work has now evolved and, in addition to tropes of memory being documented, our own family album finds its space in this work.
8. Do your projects typically run in parallel, or do you focus on one project at a time?
Since all my work is driven from personal concerns, concerns that run concurrently, I work on multiple projects at the same time and for considerable periods of time.
My work on Munna Guru began in 1995 and I continued to photograph her until her death in 2003. My work on HIV+ people was made between 2000 and 2006, commissioned first by UNAIDS and then supported by a grant by the FORD Foundation. My work with Laxmi began in 2003 and I continue to photograph her, seventeen years later. My work in Kashmir, which is also ongoing, began in 2016. I keep going from working on one project to the other and while some find closure, some simply continue.
9. Your initial work has focused on sexuality. You worked with Munna Guru and then went on to document the lives of gay men, male sex workers, and then, of course, Laxmi. What draws you to this subject matter?
As mentioned earlier, all my work arrives from personal concerns and is a response to the realities around me. I grew up around people close to me living dual lives. This reality came with the realization that sex occupies a major part of our lives; that one’s sexuality and one’s response to it determines, to a great extent, how one’s life is and what shape it takes. For this reason, I found myself drawn to the lives of people who were coming to terms with their sexuality and living their lives thereon. This work, which is still in progress, has been an attempt to document the lives of people who have been marginalized because of their sexual preferences.
10. There was a certain way in which you were framing your images in the first decade of your career and one sees a distinct shift thereafter. Why is this?
Even though I was photographing concerns that were personal to me, I was still photographing the other for the first decade. The work was about encountering an image while following the people I was photographing; these were moments stolen from the lives people lived. With self-portraits I had to encounter myself and that changed the way I was seeing. How does one confront oneself? I became for the first time the subject of my own camera. It was a different experience, of looking and being looked at.
It was a most visceral experience I had to put on camera, as these self-portraits were an enactment of what I was feeling at certain moments and this new experience of photographing liberated me from the constraints of having to ‘find the moment.’ Now, I could gather my experiences over time and find newer forms for putting them together. This found continuation in the projects, hereafter. With my current work on Kashmir, the challenge has been the enormous gravity of the issue, and that of the accumulated experiences of individuals and the community. I have relied on the staged, constructed, stitched-and-framed form as a response to these challenges.
11. How do you measure success or that a body of work is going well?
I inherently rely on how I, myself, feel about my work. Having said that, I often share my work with Devika Daulet Singh, the Director of PHOTOINK, who has always given her critical feedback. For the last decade or so, I have been sharing my work with my partner, whose critical feedback I equally value.
12. Do you ever find yourself creatively ‘stuck?’ Is there something that is particularly helpful to you in overcoming this?
Yes, at times. Conversations with my partner help a great deal.
13. How much effort do you put into getting your work shown? Is this important to you? If so, why? Does showing your work feed your creative process, or does it distract you from it?
I hardly put any effort in getting my work shown. I just keep making work and when the right time comes, it gets shown.
14. We know that fine art or documentary photography is not always enough to make a living. Some do commercial work, others teach. Are there other photography related areas that you work with in order to supplement your living; some that you would recommend aspiring photographers to consider?
I strongly believe that doing documentary photography is a way of life and one should not have to put the burden on it to make a living from. It’s totally fine to make a living doing something else and have a parallel photographic practice that is not compromised.
I was fortunate to be able to make a living for 15 years doing photography assignments and build my personal practice on the side without it being compromised. I eventually got into teaching and now work as a researcher and educator and continue to work on my personal projects.
15. Digital technology has changed photography drastically over the last few years. Did you initially embrace the changes or resist them? Do you believe the changes have been good for the medium or not? Why?
In my opinion, digital technology is over-rated, and it has been good for the medium only partially. For young people getting into photography, I think they have had more to lose than gain. I relate to Alec Soth’s words made in reference to digital technology, “The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool…. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter.”
16. With your years of experience, of the lessons you have learned, what is the one thing you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
I wish someone had told me the importance and value of cataloging and archiving one’s own work.
17. How would an interested collector go about buying your work?
By sending a request to PHOTOINK: info@photoink.net
18. If you didn’t do photography, what other career might you have pursued?
It would only be photography.
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Copyright © Imran Kokiloo
20 November
