6 months of pictures from Bombay now behind me and there seems to be a couple of hundred more to choose from.
During these months, I've realized that if one thing characterizes Bombay ( at least from the always-perversly voyeristic photographers perspective) is that it is one of the most photogenic cities I've been in. Or to be more precise, it is not unique in being photogenic as every place has such potential in one way or another; rather, Bombay has a distinct quality to it that has to do with its people and the relationship people have to the production of space and color around them. I've been to many cities where all I want to take pictures of is of buildings, architecture, landscape: where the people themselves are almost distractions or have a peculiarly supplementary relationship to the giant architectural machinery of the city. Bombay, on the contrary, is another kind of machine where the buildings transmutate into people transmutate into action into space - like millions of spiders weaving their webs each forming a complex and unpredictable yet ordered meshwork of relationships. The web is the people is the space is the buildings and vice versa.
So going back to the images I've chosen, it has been interesting to note that most of them do actually deal with people and everyday life. Don't know if I've fallen a victim of the cliches of stereotypical representation here, but I've found it hard to repeat the city in photograpy without always foregrounding the web of people, the daily spinning, buzz, momevent. Hopefully, a trip back to the city sometime soon will allow me to develop a more thought-out articulated photo-series of the city ... at least more than what I have tried here with my somewhat random Still Tour 2005 that started off with three people and ended up to me alone keeping up the Tour after the computer crash of my original co-conspirator. And if nothing else has come out of this, at least it has allowed me to clarify vision: for
photography is never about the image; it is about learning to see differently, learning to repeat what we see every day just a little differently for us to go beyond the habit or everyday reality...
Meanwhile, more stuff still to exlplore in my archives. Lets which part of the city I shall return next...
