1. What is your earliest memory of how or what attracted you to photography?
I grew up with lots of drugs and crime in Salt Lake City in Calcutta. In the ’90s and early 2000s, every time I came out of rehab, my father would give me a gift. In 2006, after spending six months in a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of Calcutta, my father gifted me a camera. I wanted to change my old playthings, playmates, and playgrounds, and slowly this camera helped me out. I was lonely and bored, and I suddenly realized that I was obsessively taking photos. It became my only friend. Finally, I got clean in 2009 after spending four months in rehab, and I continued making photos because I didn’t know anything else. Also, it gave me an identity. I was sick and tired of telling people that I didn’t do anything at all. When I started saying, “I am a photographer,” I could slowly create a different identity for myself. People also believed me.
2. Did you study photography formally in a college or university? If not, how did you inform yourself about the medium – the techniques, the language and the aesthetics of it?
No, I didn’t. I always loved looking at paintings and music videos. Most of my friends and drug-using partners were musicians, and I grew up watching lots of music videos from the ’80s and ’90s. Those images got me interested in the visual arts for the first time.
3. In your opinion, is it important to have formal training in photography? Why?
There is no formal training program in India! There have been a few in the last few years, however, the faculty, resources, etc are not great and I don’t know if this can help anyone really.
Otherwise, formal training is great. Why not? If I could have joined a school when I was 17 or 18, I would have done so much more. The Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Calcutta (SRFTI) gives every student 10 lakhs (15 thousand USD) to make their diploma film. Can we imagine something like this for photographers – something that can be funded by the Indian state? Unless something like this happens, there is no hope. Photographers end up being illustrators for journalists and writers. There is no real editorial or art market for photographers in India. So, I don’t know what the future may be. Even if there is any possibility of formal training in India, what are they going to do after their studies? Beg to the west, if they are not from super rich families? If we cannot produce and consume ourselves, what is the point of anything at all?
4. If you were to design a photo program for young Indian photographers what would it look like?
It would definitely be a degree course, more on the lines of Visva Bharati, but not how it is run today; it should be run the way it was when Tagore had started it. Students have to know what is happening all over the world – and no, the Internet does not say or show everything. Also, a good course structure alone doesn’t help anything; one needs great teachers. Visva Bharati was not great because it had a great course, but because it had teachers like Benodebehari, Nandalal Bose, and Ramkinkar Baij, among so many others.
5. Who or what has inspired you to pursue photography and/or continues to do so?
As I said before, it was a situation of life and death for me, and not really a choice. I don’t know anything else. I would die if I didn’t do what I do.
6. Is there a book, an exhibition or a body of work that has really impressed you and maybe even influenced your work / life?
There are so many, actually, and pointing out one or a few would do a great injustice to everything else that I have loved and lived with for so many years.
7. What draws / drew you to the subject matter you are pursuing in your current work?
I recently have made my debut feature film, Cat Sticks. David Levi Strauss wrote a piece, A Threnody for Street Kids, for Jim Goldberg’s photographic installation, which later became the famous book, Raised by Wolves, 1995. In the essay, the first few lines of a paragraph read, “Like the angel of forgetfulness who touches us at birth to make us forget so that we can be born (becoming is a secret process), there is another angel, I suspect, who touches us when we become adults, causing us to forget the abyss of adolescence.”
For my friends and me, perhaps this angel was brown sugar, which made us forget the dark abyss of adolescence. Cat Sticks is the story of our lives. It’s the collective experience of an entire generation who grew up with drugs on the streets of Calcutta in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Innocence, the unadulterated, unconditional love for drugs, and its eventual predictable end and consequences inspired the story.
8. You started out as a photographer and then progressed to making films. Why did you feel the need to do this? Was the photograph itself not sufficient?
I made a film in 2019, called Cat Sticks. Actually, I came to films a little arrogantly. I think I just got hooked to the medium, all of a sudden, exactly in the same way I was hooked to photography many years back. It was amazing to feel it in the stomach again. There were so many stories that I have lived with for years, and I was desperate to tell them for a very long time. They were a part of who I was and there was no way I could tell these stories through my photographs. It was the medium’s limitation, or maybe mine, that I could never imagine this in a photographic body of work. The reasons to make a photograph and the reasons to make a film, I realized, were distinctly different. Photography is more in the here and now. I think anything which is problematic in the present is a photograph, and whatever is an unresolved past becomes a film.
9. Do your projects typically run in parallel, or do you focus on one project at a time?
There is no break at all. I work every day, seven days a week, and I usually work on multiple projects together.
10. How do you measure success or that a body of work is going well?
There is no success. There is only failure and rejection. Finding peace is the biggest success, but it’s so far away. I am usually restless and paranoid. However, in the last couple of years I have learned a thing or two about balancing things in life. It’s still very chaotic and confusing. I do share with friends, but so many of them are artists and they have their own insecurities and egos. So, it’s always tricky. I have been stupid and naïve and a loudmouth all my life, so I find it difficult to navigate in these rather sensitive relationships. But, then again, I am nothing without these friends I am talking about. They are my life! They are the first ones I share my work with.
11. Do you ever find yourself creatively ‘stuck?’ Is there something that is particularly helpful to you in overcoming this?
I go back and try to find the reasons for which I started working in the very first place. All the confusion vanishes. It’s a great method.
12. How much effort do you put into getting your work shown? Is this important to you? Does showing your work feed your creative process or does it distract from it?
If I am creating work as an exercise, I don’t show it to anyone. If I am making new work, it’s meant for people to see.
13. Do you feel that there are adequate opportunities and avenues to share / show your work in India, or do you always look for such opportunities abroad?
Both. But, as I said earlier, we need to be able to find a space where we can create and consume ourselves. Just as Japan did among all the Asian countries, they weren’t dependent on the west. I wish we could get there. I don’t know when that would be possible, though.
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 don’t think I am the best person to advise on such things.
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?
The changes have been both, good and bad. None of us in my generation would have been able to become photographers if digital wasn’t there. However, there is too much rubbish being seriously made. Not that it wasn’t made before, but it’s now being made in abundance and the gatekeepers are clueless and have hit rock bottom, which is probably the worst in the last century. They have absolutely no clue what they are showing, why they are showing, what they want to do. Not at all. Everyone wants to stay relevant and save the brand, but everyone else is watching everything and not looking at anything at all, both at the same time. It’s a peculiar time.
16. Do you think there is a universal language that photography uses? Do you think that Indian photographers are finding that they are judged by western criteria and standards?
Yes. And at times it is absolutely ridiculous. It is this same reason that people like Ritwik Ghatak were never celebrated in India when they were alive. And it’s deeply unfortunate and sad.
17. 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 to just do your thing, don’t listen to anyone. Don’t waste your time listening to others. Just do your thing. And the fact that it’s always going to be lonely. Get used to it! The sooner the better. And always try to delay gratification – which people have told me before, but I keep forgetting.
18. How would an interested collector go about buying your work?
They can get in touch with me through my website.
19. If you didn’t do photography, what other career might you have pursued?
I started working in a private investigation agency just after finishing high school. Later, I worked in bars and restaurants and then studied journalism. If there was no photography or arts, I would still be struggling with old playgrounds, playthings, and playmates.
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Copyright © Twisha
20 November
