Photographs

Michael

I open my camera and look at a photo I took a week or two ago. I flick to another. And another. And another. Every photo I see a canvas, a hectic, messed-up, disorganised canvas splattered by paint from a troubled, sporadic artistic. Without order or reason, a million blotches of paint dropped from bucket, creating a dazzling, inscrutable, absorbing smorgasbord of purposes, goals, and contradictions.

One photo, taken by a typical train track illustrates the visual waterfall of colour that is the usual cross-section of Indian life. Every second looking at the photo reveals another story. A metre away from the tracks a stall is set up selling the standard array of Indian street snacks. Atop the shack, a blue corner of tarpaulin peeks over the edge, a hint at the shop owner's bed for the night, and many nights more. In another corner, a mother sits cradling her baby. Her seat is the dirt floor of a home held up by bamboo sticks with a cloth draped over the top. Elsewhere, a man pulls a cart piled impossibly high with a cluttered assortment of items, another carries a basket on his head, piled even higher. 

Any scene in Mumbai paints the same picture and elucidates the same theme, but with a heavier dollop of contradictions. A block of opulent high rise apartments pours seamlessly into a swarm of destitute slums. Tourists walk out of a six star waterfront hotel to then step past homeless beggars a block later. Billionaires sit atop private skyscrapers while millions scramble to make a living in the squalor down below. Every photo, every scene, every moment spent in this city, in this country weaves together these skeins of colour, vibrancy, and life. Every day I go out into the street for a walk, for a drive I am confronted by this uncontrollable, ungovernable, unconstrained canvas of colours.