Indelible compositions

Siddhartha Tawadey’s images are full of movement and emotion.

Is it an elephant or is it a boy? Well, they are inseparable, says photographer Siddhartha Tawadey while describing what is undeniably the most striking image from his collection of work titled Transience — a photographic salutation to impermanency. This particular image that we are looking at is called “Elephant Boy” and is a product of the superimposition of portraits of the Madurai Meenakshi temple’s elephant and its handler’s son. Tawadey says he chose to do this because while interacting with the boy he found that the elephant was a larger-than-life figure in the boy’s life, and vice-versa.

 

“I like to engage the viewer,” says Tawadey. That’s something he’s been doing ever since the photographer started releasing his works. His current theme follows his previous two collections, one where he constantly tries to provoke thought, conversation and debate with his photographs. In Tawadey’s view, it’s very important, especially in an era “saturated” with imagery, especially of the digital variety. “It takes a lot today for a photograph to engage an audience,” he says.

Transience, Tawadey says, “draws inspiration from the Buddhist concept of Mu (no) Jo (permanence).” He has interpreted this to lend a sense of motion to his photographs. “Why restrict yourself to the static?” he adds when we exchange notes on photography.

The works in this collection can be broadly divided into two. The first is a series of landscapes where the photographer shows nature in motion, using techniques that he says can be found in a Van Gogh or a Monet. He has tried to replicate the effect of gentle brush strokes by slowing down the shutter speed of his camera and inducing motion in multiple axes. When the setting is a misty morning or a billowing sandstorm, the result, explains Tawadey, is quite ethereal. “If you touch the image, you will feel they will break. They are fragile,” he says. On a lighter note, he adds that he is better off replicating the Monets and Van Goghs with the camera, because, as he puts it, “I can’t draw to save my life”.

The second series showcases Tawadey’s experiments with the delicate art of superimposing images in the dark room. In an age of digital media, Tawadey says he still prefers working on negatives and doing his prints by hand. But dark room superimposition is an unpredictable technique, with results that can vary wildly and almost never be duplicated. So, in all of Tawdey’s superimpositions, he has created a mother print and then duplicated them digitally. This, he says, is unavoidable.

The result is quite stunning. Other than the “Elephant Boy”, another commendable superimposition is “Soul”, a rather stark image of a little blonde girl sitting on grass upon which a barren tree is imposed.

Tawadey has been shooting for the last 18 years and adds that there are many more repositories of images that are yet to come out of his dark room. It has been a long journey for the man — a management degree holder in the UK, Tawadey was an investment banker, heading charity projects, who now exhibits his photographs. He says his travels and photography have opened his eyes to people and more so to nature.

“Nature pre-dates man. It is fragile,” he reiterates. We wouldn’t disagree.