1. What is your earliest memory of how or what attracted you to photography?
I started considering photography a bit seriously in my third year of college and I must have been 23 years old then. Thinking about it in retrospect, the nature of the implied relationship that the photographer described in a scene is what attracted me to photography. Two works that were particularly influential when I was in my third undergrad year were The Ballad by Nan Goldin and The Sentimental Journey by Nobuyoshi Araki. Both of the photographers were making work about their lived experiences and photographing their partners and immediate surroundings. The subject matter and the way they photographed articulated a feeling I could directly relate to, living in rented apartments in Delhi amongst a community of North East students.
2. Did your interest in photography begin when you were studying graphic design at Delhi College of Art?
College of Art had a defunct darkroom and offered an elective in photography basics. The course was geared towards basics of black and white portrait and still-life photography. The college required us to buy a film camera, which I did – a Nikon F75. Since I was frequenting a lot of live rock music gigs in Delhi, I made a fair number of pictures of the bands, which then got published in the Rock Street Journal. I traded the camera very soon after for a Canon Powershot and started backpacking to various parts of the country. The College of Art curriculum in itself didn’t interest me much, hence I started venturing out more and exploring photography.
3. Would you please share some of your experience of studying photography at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). How has it influenced and informed your practice?
I decided to pursue an MFA in Photography at a time when my own work and thinking had hit a wall, caught in a place between politics of identity and reinforcing of narrative, which fell short or redundant or not fully realized.
During the critique sessions, the photo faculty and the graduates at RISD always questioned the gap between two or more photographs; the blank space between the two prints.
The gap represented the thinking that informed the making and showing of the previous or the preceding photograph. The space to articulate your own thoughts and process to an audience of compassionate and talented artists was influential.
The critique space through articulation helped me compartmentalize my thoughts and sought clarity in what I was thinking and what/how I was describing my own work.
Also, setting up the context for the work had to be done through the photographs; this was both a challenging and fulfilling experience, having decided to travel back and make my thesis work about the hotel and my family.
4. Who or what has inspired you to pursue photography and/or continues to do so?
There have been instances like me being racially lynched in East Delhi during my undergrads, which have made me reconsider my life a bit more seriously. Having said that, establishing a relationship and acknowledgement through picture making in the places where I live keeps me going, and I find comfort in that.
5. Is there a book, exhibition or body of work that has really impressed you and maybe influenced your work / life?
The work of Larry Sultan, ranging from Evidence (in collaboration with Mike Mandel), Pictures from Home and The Valley have been really influential and important to me in recent years. Chauncey Hare’s Protest Photographs and Interior America are also important works for me in terms of picture making.
6. How did your experience of living in Delhi, upon your move there in 2004 to join the Delhi College of Art, lead to your early work On-Rent and Vez & Me.
Places like Safdarjung Enclave, Munirka, Indra Vihar in Delhi are strongholds for housing North East students who migrate to Delhi for college education and/or job opportunities. The house rents in these parts are comparatively cheaper than other urban neighborhoods, but more importantly the semblance of something close to home and familiar is imparted through small businesses, travel agents, beauty parlors that are often run by North Easterners, and restaurants offering a range of NE food.
I happened to move to Safdarjung Enclave in my third year of undergrad when three of my friends and I (all from NE) were lynched by locals in Laxmi Nagar (East Delhi), an area where I was living then, since it was closer to my college travel-wise. I was stabbed on my back and one of my friends, who is an illustrator, had his right-hand severed by a machete.
I moved to Safdarjung Enclave looking for a sense of security and community. Photographs for both Vez & Me and On-Rent came about after I decided to live amongst the community in Safdarjung.
The photographs from Vez & Me were, in part, me trying to learn how to operate a camera of different kinds, in different lighting conditions, and often with self-portraits. This process folded in the living conditions or way of life, my relationship with Vez, and then further on extended to On-Rent which comprised of housing portraits of friends and acquaintances who were living in rented apartments in the above-mentioned locales.
7. Issues of migration, memory, identity and displacement run through all of your projects. Can you tell our readers something about this?
It comes from a lived experience of being a minority / feeling like a minority in a country like India and always being gazed at in public or called out as Chinese or Nepalese or Japanese. Also having grown up in a working-class family of two generations, where very little is articulated; all of this is internalized in a way that subconsciously translates into photographs.
I don’t think I have consciously sought out these issues but they rather come to me in photographs I have already made and serve as fodder to make new images.
8. What draws / drew you to the subject matter you are pursuing in your current work?
It comes to me from a lived experience and temperament of a place that translates itself into photographs. The other factor is the works of other photographers, painters and filmmakers that I can relate to, sets precedence and be in conversation to push myself further.
9. Do your projects typically run in parallel, or do you focus on one project at a time?
Since all my personal projects are self-funded, I also work commercially on editorials and advertising campaigns to keep the boat afloat. Having said that, I find myself working simultaneously on 2-3 different projects / collections of images at the same time, all of them informing each other and only one of them getting fully realized. The others sit on the back burner. I do often get pulled out of my studio for commissions and that takes a while before I can get back to where I left off.
10. How do you measure success or that a body of work is going well?
I was recently thinking about portraits and how a measure of a good portrait is to perhaps embody a sense / reflection of the self (the photographer). I feel the same about a body of work, if it feels perceptive and coalesces an interest that you can live with for your whole life, then perhaps it is ready to be shared. I think it has also to do with intelligence and comprehending and knowing that the self is going to change and perhaps along with it, also the way the photograph will read / look back at you.
11. Do you ever find yourself creatively ‘stuck?’ Is there something that is particularly helpful to you in overcoming this?
Yes, I do find myself stuck sometimes. Reaching out to old friends, listening to music, observing the weather and going out to photograph help.
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 you from it?
I feel it’s important to find / have a few people in your life that you respect and can bounce ideas off. I don’t think that getting work shown should be an effort for vanity sake but rather more a conversation to refine or add value to/question the work itself.
13. Do you feel that there are adequate opportunities and avenues to share / show your work in your home country, or do you always look for such opportunities abroad?
Opportunities and avenues come with their own set of expectations, resources and limitations, which I think about and consider when deciding to show work. Having said that I have not made a concerted effort or pushed myself hard enough to show work in India as yet. All the exhibits that I have done are majorly realized through invitations and conversations around my practice and how that might relate to a context for an exhibition. It’s also a subjective and complicated decision and has to do with ambition, sustenance, expectation and, more importantly, what do you want out of your work.
For me, showing a work has to manifest through a conversation between a facilitator and the artist through which a work can be contextualized and made relevant for an audience. I have rarely had that opportunity in India.
I guess what I am trying to get at is, there are opportunities and avenues to share work in India; how much of it is in tandem with the medium and artist itself is what I am not sure of.
However, having said that, Museum Bhavan by Dayanita Singh is an exemplary example of creating an avenue for disseminating one’s own work and challenging preexisting formats of exhibitions and institutional formats. A series of photo exhibits called Blow Up organized by Blindboys Photo Collective across cities of India and founded by Akshay Mahajan and Kapil Das was another such intervention to share photographic works made by photographers / artists from South East Asia. Sohrab Hura’s self-publishing imprint Ugly Dog is another example.
I am drawn towards a more concerted effort coming from the artists themselves to diversify and create another form of showing and telling.
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 have found to supplement your living – some that you would recommend to aspiring photographers for consideration?
I worked as a fine art printer in a lab called Black and White on White – processing, printing and mounting prints for exhibitions and galleries and museums in New York. This was particularly a great set-up for me. I was working there three or four days a week and the resources in the lab were free to use after hours. So, when I was not at the lab, I would be shooting and, when back at the lab, after hours I would be processing and scanning what I had shot in the previous week. I was getting paid for the work at the lab and was simultaneously producing work.
However, you are right – practicing documentary or fine art work alone is not enough to sustain a living. I am in a similar situation right now, since I have not picked up an assignment since January and after the lockdown there is no work. This situation reminds me of a quote by Owen Butler in his book the Final Print: “Make a convincing plan for giving up photography. You might need it.”
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?
I use both digital and analog and keep switching between the two since the time I considered photography seriously. I don’t feel a huge difference between the two in terms of picture making, besides the processing and scanning of film. For better or for worse the digital shift has increased the output of work and analog photography slows your turn-around time, both of which are decisions that translate as photographs.
16. Do you think there is a universal language that photography uses? Do you think that South Asian photographers are finding that they are judged by western criteria and standards?
I wouldn’t worry about how I am being perceived or judged. For me it’s a medium from which I get to learn a lot about myself and my / other practitioners’ understanding of the world. The concern of being judged is counter-productive to the whole process.
Regarding language, the act of putting a rectangular frame and through that organizing and describing the subject matter and elements in the frame from a vantage or a proximity in a certain kind of light are all decisions which manifest into a very specific and peculiar way of rendering and perceiving the world. It’s a way of rediscovering the world and making it relevant. It reflects how much we know and don’t. So, to answer your question, perhaps it is a universal language but maybe only understood by people who are willing and ready to receive and parse out the relationships.
17. How would an interested collector go about buying your work?
You can directly reach me through my website (http://tenzingdakpa.com) or contact the London-based gallery Indigo plus Madder (https://indigoplusmadder.com).
18. If you didn’t do photography, what other career might you have pursued?
I ask myself the same question quite often.
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Copyright © Tenzing Dakpa
20 November
