an India
Festival Sculpture of Goddess Kali, Calcutta, West Bengal, 1999
quadtone carbon pigment inkjet print
7.5x7.5" Image
20x16" Mat
$375 
Artist Statement
an India – Introduction
I went to India to look at common things—temples and houses; people sitting, walking, working, worshipping; rivers and mountains; streets and shops; goddesses and gods; signs, pictures, and patterns; the sunrise; the places and happenings of each day—and to make pictures of them. With the plain medium of black and white film (and self-conscious nods to the history and heroes of photography) I recorded thousands of scenes while wrapped in Mother India’s resonance.
I traveled to India three times between late 1998 and early 2002, spending seven months moving widely about the country, with a couple of months spent, off and on, in Mumbai. These were not my first trips to India, nor are they likely to be my last. What obviously unites the pictures from this period is the square format and the black and white medium, both favorites of mine, but not necessarily the way I’ll continue to make pictures in India.
These pictures are not really the result of hard labor, but of perseverance—of walking and taking the steps to move to new places, of walking some more and continuing to look with care at the obvious. The pictures have been arranged with consideration for their subjects, places depicted, and visual relationships. These are pictures of a loved one, India, that have been collected and choreographed to convey some sense of her complexity, dignity, charm, ordinariness, contrariness, majestic depth, and mundane squalor—the confluence of the plain, the savory, and the hard to swallow, creating the unfathomable flavor of her beauty.
an India – Introduction
I went to India to look at common things—temples and houses; people sitting, walking, working, worshipping; rivers and mountains; streets and shops; goddesses and gods; signs, pictures, and patterns; the sunrise; the places and happenings of each day—and to make pictures of them. With the plain medium of black and white film (and self-conscious nods to the history and heroes of photography) I recorded thousands of scenes while wrapped in Mother India’s resonance.
I traveled to India three times between late 1998 and early 2002, spending seven months moving widely about the country, with a couple of months spent, off and on, in Mumbai. These were not my first trips to India, nor are they likely to be my last. What obviously unites the pictures from this period is the square format and the black and white medium, both favorites of mine, but not necessarily the way I’ll continue to make pictures in India.
These pictures are not really the result of hard labor, but of perseverance—of walking and taking the steps to move to new places, of walking some more and continuing to look with care at the obvious. The pictures have been arranged with consideration for their subjects, places depicted, and visual relationships. These are pictures of a loved one, India, that have been collected and choreographed to convey some sense of her complexity, dignity, charm, ordinariness, contrariness, majestic depth, and mundane squalor—the confluence of the plain, the savory, and the hard to swallow, creating the unfathomable flavor of her beauty.
| Process Statement
The photographs in this collection were originally made with a medium/square format Mamiya 6 rangefinder camera using Kodak Tri-X Pan film. The film was normally processed and then digitized using a Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED film scanner. The images were processed and manipulated in Adobe Photoshop. For exhibitions, the images have been output as quadtone inkjet prints (using Jon Cone’s Piezography software and inks), printed on an Epson 1160 printer with carbon pigment inks on Hahnemuhle fine-art inkjet paper. |