For well over a hundred years now, painting has been evolving from a literal, descriptive visual medium to a realm of ideas and pure art. A multitude of movements – from the impressionists such as Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir to mind-bogglingly prolific and versatile originality of Pablo Picasso to the hallucinatory, surreal genius of Salvador Dali to the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollack – have helped develop this art into a multi-arrayed domain of competing themes and styles.
Perhaps, it is time for us outdoor photographers to also unleash nature photography from the literal to the figurative and explore different versions of the principles of realism versus abstractions, of seeing versus imagining, of reproduction versus creation.
As I grow older, the way I dream of and design my images keeps evolving. My visual dictionary expands and my experience helps in appreciating the original ideas from the masters of the creative worlds – from photography to painting to cinema to music to books. Like the proverbial kid in a candy store, I love trying to gulp down everything that the artistic masters have to offer.
I have had help in my creative journey as a photographer, without which I might not have managed to expand by photographic bandwidth and perhaps may have continued for a longer time with my erstwhile style of straightforward visual documentation.
The inspiring time spent with Madhu Sarkar’s innovative table top creations in his photo-studio back in my days in Kolkata ten years ago, exposed me to the pictorial genre of art salons and the thought-provoking realms of surreal photography. More recently, spending time with the hugely knowledgeable yet refreshingly humble Jonathan Scott in his second home, namely, the Masai Mara, provided me a renewed impetus to rediscover the joy of applying in-field creative techniques in my work with wildlife. I am ever thankful to these mentors and to my myriad photographic friends with whom I have shot in various stimulating locations, from the rain-forests of Rwanda to the frozen seas of Svalbard. Most intriguingly, however, I am grateful to the creative visual masters across genres such as Art Wolfe, Frans Lanting, Raghu Rai, Steve McCurry, Sebastiao Salgado et al, whose work I have long admired from afar. Earlier, I had seen their awe-inspiring pictures in books and galleries and nowadays study them in the virtual world through the internet. I have been, in a sense, in an informal distant learning programme from all these masters on how to take one’s photography to the next level, a bit like Eklavya in the Mahabharata who, by worshipping the statue of the great guru Dronacharya, learnt the art of archery.
As one evolves as a photographic artist, the basic tools of image-making become a given: these include a sound working knowledge of one’s camera equipment including flashlights, lenses and tripods; of understanding the photographic possibilities of various lighting conditions; of leveraging prior knowledge about one’s intended photo-subject; of having adequate post-processing and image organization workflow competencies in software such as Adobe Lightroom and so on.
The next level in the creative journey, however, is more about how to spark one’s imagination and translate one’s visual ideas and aspirations into duly designed pictures. By designing pictures, in the context of nature photography, I am certainly not talking of elaborate post processing using Photoshop – far from it! Designing pictures is more about expanding one’s ability to “see” what others perhaps may not; designing pictures means having the ability to create compelling compositions incamera by understanding how points of view, choice of lenses, angles of shooting, interpretations of light, action, lines, shapes, patterns, colours, shutter speeds, aperture and other factors inter-play with one another and impact the image design. This leads to gradually developing one’s own distinctive style, which ofcourse, will evolve as well!
I have gradually realized that one of the ways to create one’s own pictures is to design images like a line or a small stanza from a poem, to express a thought or feeling. In my childhood I loved reciting poems and based on some enthusiastic attempts at writing rhymes, I had, at the age of ten, been gifted a notebook for writing poems by a kind-hearted neighbour. That notebook later gave way to a diary. Some publications in newspapers and magazines followed. And some heartbreaks. And my attempts at what I thought was poetry filled the pages as I grew up.
Later when I discovered film photography thanks to my late father, and then the more affordable digital photography, my written poetry gave way to attempts at visual poetry. My poetry diary and my film photographs have long gone missing – perhaps forever. But music and poetry, visual or written, can still help me find myself and lose myself at the same time. They help catalyze creative thoughts and provide the sparks that urge me to try and tell stories or express my thoughts and feelings through my pictures.
A surreal sunset in the Masai Mara can therefore, without warning, remind me of a lyrical stanza from a song by Rabindranath Tagore or make me want to recollect some half-forgotten verse by T S Eliot. A twinkling night sky above Mount Kilimanjaro or in the high Himalayas can sub-consciously take me back though time and space to the immortal quatrains of Omar Khayyam, or suddenly transform into a Vincent Van Gogh painting. And it is this type of inspiring inputs from other art sources that help keep the creative juices flowing.
As I try to go up the path of visual exploration, I am often confronted with creative compositional choices. With experience I have realised I am getting more and more predisposed to leave out more than I include in my compositions. I have got more inclined towards designing suggestive abstracts, or trying to capture the drama of emotion or motion in context of my photographic subject, be it in a landscape, wildlife or human interest visual. Increasingly, I endeavour to go beyond simply creating pretty pictures or action images, which, by the way, I must emphatically state that I still enjoy and continue to make whenever suitable opportunities present themselves.
A key learning for me has been the internalization of the fact that how we see is often more important than simply what we see. While the latter, that is, gaining proper access to one’s intended subject, be it a unique cultural event or a special natural history moment, remains sine qua non, consciously honing this craft of “seeing” certainly helps in differentiating how various photographers will make pictures under similar circumstances. For example, the abstract is often more compelling than the obvious – a back-lit, side-lit or spot-lit photograph is at times more visually arresting than a ‘perfectly’ front-lit image; a wide-angle close-up of an animal in its natural habitat sometimes tells the story better than a frame-filling telephoto portrait; a slow-shutter-pan is often a more interesting depiction of a moving subject than using fast shutter speed to freeze the rhythm of nature.
Even after clicking tens of thousands of images in over twenty-five countries, I still enjoy experimenting and learning new things about visual art and understanding light …. still feel kicked about going to the outdoors to try and create something interesting with my camera … still get excited and humbled in equal measure to see my work awarded or featured in mainstream publications or hung on a buyer’s drawing room wall …still love immersing myself in nature and art at the the same time … still relish succumbing to a relentless streak of contagious creativity and self-discovery. This is a never-ending inward journey of healing, connecting and communicating. A journey that helps put our day-to-day superfluous and transient triumphs and defeats in perspective. A journey that attempts to seek the very soul of a photograph, which helps me discover the essence of my own soul.
The muse may be different for different shutterbugs, but the art we can create as photographers through pictorial poetry is capable of transcending genres, boundaries, languages and cultures. And thereby enable us to visually share our unique inward journeys with the outside world.
