bhabanism

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State of Street Photography Community in India

Though I have been doing photography for a long time, I started doing street photography dedicatedly around 2.5 years back. In Pune, there are just a couple of photographers who do it and are mostly solo shooters, infact that’s how it is mostly, street photography is a solo endeavor by the very nature of it.  Instagrammers’ large fan gatherings are not street photography events, check out my blog What is Street Photography to understand more of it. In these 2.5 years I joined many groups and forums, studied various stuff online, blogs, YouTube, read some books, and discussed with many photographers. 

There are two things that I observed that happened frequently, there are of course exceptions, probably I won’t be even writing this blog if there were no exceptions, but there are two very prominent things that are too evident to be overlooked. 

Firstly, exclusivity of the experts and secondly, the narcissism of the novices. I know these are strong words, but I think it would be the exceptions to these who would find time to read a blog so I am not offending the readers for sure. Let me elaborate what I mean by these two observations.

Exclusivity of the Experts

There are many good photographers in India, in street photography genre as well but there are just a handful who go out to share their knowledge and experience with you, I am talking about street photography only not the travel and tourism photography at tourist locations, there are plenty making money out of those. When it comes to art aspect of street photography just a handful are helpful. Most hide their knowledge from novice photographers as if it’s some trade secret even though almost everything can be found out just by google search. There are forums in which your photos will be declined without telling you any reason, no feedback is provided on why it was not approved. It’s definitely fine to reject a photo in a forum to maintain quality but if no reason is provided it surely feels elitism and rude. This communication gap is probably the prime reason that serious street photography community in India with a population of some billions.. I lost count, has around 5000 experts and novices in total. The rest potential enthusiasts have moved on to instagrammy photography but still think they do and tag #streetphotography, we may call them names, say they lack taste, no sense of aesthetics, but the bottom-line is the experts in street photography community didn’t manage to provide a platform to encourage and groom and affordable learning resources to a huge number of potential enthusiasts, my estimate being around 200,000 or more. A few experts definitely are doing their part, but a bigger effort needs to be put by the experts to -

help develop visual literacy among the enthusiasts, there by make it less niche

add glamour to street photography, which the experts know is much much harder than many other genres and needs years of practice, but still doesn’t attract as much attention in India as say travel or lifestyle photography. How to add glamour can be a topic of discussion. 

It’s all doable, may be with local collaborations in each city/town, or in online platforms, it need not be altruistic, it just needs to be affordable. More the experts give it a try, more the people who are visually literate, more the appreciation and understanding of the experts’ work there will be, it’s in their own benefit. 

Narcissism of the Novices  

Though I am using a strong word, I don’t blame today’s novice for this behavior, it’s more of the social as well as technical environment of today. When I started photography, there was no open platform to post photos, it was small forums where we posted with the C&C note to photo, meaning Critic and Comment, being critiqued was the only constant thing, be it photography or at home or school, it was a way of life, every step was judged, that was extreme. Today no step is judged, to be politically correct, homo sapiens have lost the faculty of judgement. Judgement is offensive now. If someone says “your photo is ugly” people will go buy fairness cream for themselves. 

If anyone is really serious to learn even the basics of photography, it’s important to find mistakes in our own work, take others help to find mistakes in our work, when we are starting out we are clueless what is a mistake, forget what makes a good photo, we don’t even know what makes a bad photo. Do not make the silly excuse that art is subjective and your photo is your art, work just by classification of art doesn’t make it great, there’s great art and horrible art, just saying art does not make it great.  Either learn to make less ugly art or give up making visual pollution. 

The law today may stop our parents and teachers to judge us but the world doesn’t care about us, no one gonna hand hold us if we ourself are sentimental about what great art we are making. If someone is critiquing our work we should try to concentrate and listen and understand what they are saying instead of justifying this and that, no one cares about our justifications, it’s just plain rude and shows we are not receptive to someone spending their personal time to help us improve.  I have seen photographers with such attitude stuck at their personal peak for decades never to improve in life. Let’s give it up, open ourself, aim higher and suck the blood.. I mean suck the knowledge out of photographers who are open to share it with us. 

Let’s make a bigger and better community. 

Footnote: The photograph in this blog is shot by me in 2010 on 1st Day of my 1st Camera which I bought 2nd hand. I was wowed by my great skills for 12 hours then I shared it in a forum for C&C after which...

[bhabanism]

On Being Amateur

Today we are in awe with the term “professional”, we somehow feel this designation is equivalent to an expert, someone who has mastered not only the craft but also the art. That’s not just an exaggeration but also can be totally misleading. A professional photographer is anyone who earns his living through photography and doesn’t guarantee an interest (passion is too intense a word to use) in the craft or art aspect of photography by definition itself. A deeper interest and curiosity in the tools and the creative outcomes of using the tools for personal expression are entirely disconnected to the monetary benefits that may be generated in the process. Can you be a professional and an artist, of course there are many such great artists who inspire us all the time, but then we also have inspirations like Van Gogh, who sold just one painting in his life time. 

And here’s what the father of modern photography has to say - 

“Let me here call attention to one of the most universally popular mistakes that have to do with photography – that of classing supposedly excellent work as professional, and using the term amateur to convey the idea of immature productions and to excuse atrociously poor photographs. 

As a matter of fact nearly all the greatest work is being, and has always been done, by those who are following photography for the love of it, and not merely for financial reasons. As the name implies, an amateur is one who works for love; and viewed in this light the incorrectness of the popular classification is readily apparent.” 

– Alfred Stieglitz

Being an Amateur (lover as the french mean it) is to be in love with something, it is not about your occupation but constant preoccupation, an obsession, a one sided pathological pursuit.

Footnote: The image used in the post is  Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon, 1889, by Vincent van Gogh

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/

[bhabanism]

The curious case of colour

Lot of us are under the impression that black and white photos are somehow superior to colour, may be this notion has come from looking at bnw photos of the masters, the magnum photographers, the classics. I would not be writing this blog if most of us were making an informed artisitic choice between bnw or colour, few are but most are not. Either most are converting failed photos to bnw to somehow make it work or are somehow convinced that bnw is art and colour is not. I will be laughed at if I propose bnw is better than colour in any other visual arts, may be Van Gogh will chop my ear.

As we are street photographers, let’s hear what Bresson says on why he used bnw and not colour -

“Color photophography brings with it a number of problems that are hard to resolve today, and some of which are difficult even to foresee, owning to its complexity and its relative immaturity. At present [1952], color film emulsions are still very slow. Consequently, photographers using color have a tendency to confine themselves to static subjects; or else to use ferociously strong artificial lights.” - Henri Cartier Bresson.

So basically, street photography was just impossible to do with colour film at Bresson’s time. But later on, when it was possible, almost all Magnum photographers moved to colour.

And we also have probably India’s all time best photographer, Raghubir Singh making books after books in colour film (he used fill flash too outdoors), here’s what he says -

“Colour has never been an unknown force in India. It is the fountain not of new styles and ideas but of the continium of life itself. In India, no one uses the commonplace and self-conscious western term colourist - the word does not even exist in our artistic vocabulary. Indians know colour through intuition, while the west tries to know it through the mind. Indeed, India is a river of colour.” - Raghubir Singh

If you are shooting India and you have the mindset that colour is vulgar, you will never be able to capture the essence of this ancient civilization. Colours are the symbols of this land and its people, its very signature of continuity.

Here’s more in defense of colour from a great photography teacher -

“Keep in mind that color is inherently closer to reality than black-and-white. Unless you’re totally color blind—and very few people are totally color blind—you see the everyday world in color. So you’re somewhat constrained in pushing color balance or saturation . . . unless your imagery goes into the abstract realm. It’s hard to push colors of recognizable and realistic scenes very far from “realism” before they simply appear to be wrong, yet photographers forget this repeatedly. My recommendation is to try to remember the original scene, which will prove to give you a better basis of how far you can alter, saturate, or desaturate those colors to keep them compatible with the mood you wish to convey.” - Bruce Barnbaum

“I have long felt that it may be easier to make an acceptable color photograph than a black-and-white photograph, but it may be even more difficult to make an outstanding one. Because color is instantly recognizable and is therefore more accessible to the average person, it’s easy to make pleasant images. But because color is so accessible, it’s hard to break away from a documentary image to one that is personally expressive: too often the scene dominates over the mood, the feeling, or the interpretation. Creating an image in color that is truly expressive—one that breaks away from the scene—requires a great deal of thought and dedication, as well as rapport with and deep understanding of the subject. None of this comes easily, but when it is achieved, the results can be breathtaking.“ - Bruce Barnbaum

Footnote: The image used in this post is Playing 'Punishment', a Marble Game, Bombay, Maharashtra, 1991 by Raghubir Singh

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/

[bhabanism]

On Techniques and Compositions

Composition is an integral part of a picture, it’s infact the very language of visual communication. But like any language if the parts are too prominent the harmony feels lost, it feels bombastic. I prefer it to be more organic, the structure giving a support to the message and not being the message itself. An intended leading line feels much more pleasing as well as intelligent than a well defined concrete line seeking all attention and in most cases away from the main subject (provided there’s one).

The feel is similar or worse when techniques are visible; Instagram is full of such gimmick shots, like panning, bokeh of clutter, sun stars, flares, weird color tones, zoom bursts, and much more. The core street photography community in India avoids it luckily.

Here’s what the masters say on this topic -

“Technique should be invisible. This means that the viewer should be unaware of the techniques you employed because everything appears natural and correct. The viewer should have the feeling that “you were in the right place at the right time”—in other words, you were simply “lucky” to have been there—leaving that viewer completely unaware of all the maneuvering you may have gone through to achieve the image being viewed. When used intelligently and effectively, none of those maneuvers should be evident. When technique becomes apparent, the image, itself, is lost.”

- Bruce Barnbaum

“Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move. In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographers disposal is his own pair of eyes. Any geometrical analysis, any reducing of the picture to a schema, can be done only (because of its very nature) after the photograph has been taken, developed and printed --- and then it can be used for postmortem examination of the picture.”

- Henri-Cartier Bresson 

Footnote - The image used in this post was shot by me in 2010 at Khadi War Memorial, Pune. Photography is now banned there today.

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/ 

[bhabanism]

Ten Commandments of Street Photography

Yes, you have freedom to do what you like, nobody cares, but if you want to be taken seriously in the street photography community then avoid these 10 sins -

1. Posed Portraits are not considered Street Photography (as my previous blog on What is Street Photography explains with the reasoning behind it, it’s not about being biased, it’s more of the philosophical approach it is based upon, read it)

2. Keep natural colours, no manipulation of colour channels and avoid over saturation or selective color in post (same reason, the philosophy is to not manipulate the scene but just be the observer)

3. Avoid over sharpening

4. Avoid lens distortions

5. Don’t add flares in post processing

6. Don’t invert photos in post

7. BnW of clutter is not better than colour of clutter

8. Colour is not inferior to BnW, it’s not early 20th century when fast colour film were not invented

9. Bokeh of clutter is still clutter.

10. HDR is ugly, don’t make grey photos.

Avoid these beginner mistakes and speed up your street photography.

Footnote: The image messed up in this post is shot by me in 2018 in Pune. 

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/

[bhabanism]

What is Street Photography

There’s a huge confusion somehow when it comes to what the definition of street photography is, the confusion is only in India in instagram, google and wiki and all books on the topics are nowhere ambiguous about what it means. Maybe we Indians are a little lazy about just googling it, I don’t think those people will be reading this blog anyway. But maybe for those who are already aware I will share stuff to help them to have a stronger resolve in their solitary pursuit. 

Like Caravaggio is father of Baroque Painting and Picasso of Cubism, the Father of Street Photography is Henri-Cartier Bresson. Bresson may not have invented candid photography but he proposed in his writing the approach, the philosophy, the very essence of this genre of photography which was later named street photography by the followers of his school of thought. What falls under street photography and what doesn’t, will be crystal clear when we understand the philosophy behind it. Let’s see what he is saying, these are not just motivational quotes, they are the definition of the genre, so try to understand them. 

“There are those who take photographs arranged beforehand and those who go out to discover the image and seize it. For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to give a meaning to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of mind, sensitivity and a sense of geometry - it is by great economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

“To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning.” - Henri Cartier-Bresson

The key phrase here is “recognition of the significance of an event” (while simultaneously organizing and capturing it), that’s the crux of it. If the recognition of the event is disconnected to the capturing of the event then it’s no more (street) photography for Bresson. What does this mean… if you preconceive an image and set it up before capturing it, it’s no longer street photography. The capturing and organizing (composing) has to be together. 

“Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson 

Street photography is not about documenting an event happening on the street with a series of photos but the skill lies in capturing the whole essence of the event in a single image. 

“A photographer must always work with the greatest respect for his subject and in terms of his own point of view.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

The definitive statement on ethics of candid photography, do not show your subject in a disrespectful manner. Don’t tag #poorkid for likes. 

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

This can mean many things, my understanding is that a photograph should be good technically, visually and conceptually.

So that’s street photography. This does not mean other forms of photography are somehow wrong, one can do anything they like, I do multiple things myself, from architecture, still life, portrait with interaction, etc but it’s good to know that they are not technically street photography to avoid confusion, to discuss them in context and not to bother fashion photographers with candidness of strangers.  

Street Photography is an approach to photography and is not defined based on subject or location like other genres. The approach as defined by Bresson limits the genre to have the subject matter to be unstaged and unposed as if it’s staged it is no longer simultaneous recognition of event occuring and it’s capture.

If you can get a hand on Bresson’s books “The Decisive Moment” or “The Mind’s Eye” get them.

Footnote: Image used in this post is  Callejón of the Valencia Arena, 1933 by Henri-Cartier Bresson. 

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/

[bhabanism]

On Classification

There’s some romanticism among instagrammers and other beginner photographers against classification of their photos (even though they are using #streetphotography #poorkid and tagging everything out there to get featured, that’s a topic for another day). 

But let’s check the fundamental question, should art be classified? I can’t understand why this should even be a question, why should it not be classified? Throughout art history… in fact art history itself is the history of classification of art. Classification helps discussion, pursuit and advancement of art. Music, Painting, Sculpture, Poetry, etc are not interchangeable, one can’t go to Vatican and sell them music while they need the walls painted. One can’t paint Abstract Expressionism by studying Baroque paintings. 

One can photograph what they like, but the outcome is bound to get classified whether one likes it or not, classification is a natural and essential process of comprehension, unless the art is incomprehensible, which social media is full of and clarifies the reason behind our phobia of being classified, that it may fall under the classification named “shit”. 

Instead, we should be open to being classified as shit, so that we get an honest opinion to improve upon and stop behaving like self proclaimed artists. Most people calling themselves artists are just engineers, mass manufacturing things they see trending on social media. I am an engineer by profession and I know only the first prototype is good, the mass manufactured samples keep getting worse and worse as they are made by machines without thoughts. We can try improving the prototypes instead by putting in our own thoughts. Being just an unclassified artist is not going to make it something great. Having a paint brush in hand doesn’t make one artist, even the guy painting vehicle number plates has paint brush. He mass produces number plates, he is an engineer (no offense to engineers, I am one, mass production has its role, a big role, may be bigger than artists). But it’s disgusting to see engineers justifying mass production defects as art. 

If we seriously want to improve, we need to study the classifications we already fall into, explore the depths and add our own ideas to make something that’s not superficial. It’s even fine to be superficial as long as we don’t claim to be some great artist and are honest about it. But if we want to make anything meaningful, meaningful even to ourselves, we need to be honest about it.

Footnote: The image used in the post is Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/

[bhabanism]

Inception

raison d'etre: I love babbling and ranting and spamming, it’s a passion as is photography, bigoted moral lectures are my bread and butter. 

Anyways, let’s be honest, Street Photography is fucking hard. You are lucky if you have masters in your locality to learn from, but mostly they are also not much accessible, which may not be because they are having an elitist attitude but either because they are not good at teaching or they know we lack the visual literacy to even learn from them.  

Due to this, I perceive a huge gap between the masters’ level and the beginners’ level, a huge divide, the middle level is almost missing in India. There are lots of photographers who are working hard to bridge this gap, I put myself in this gang, working to go from beginner level to the middle level.

I started street photography just 2 years back, all alone even without knowing that there’s a term called street photography, I didn’t even had an instagram account that time. It was all through the desire of getting the candid expression of strangers as I found the expressions boring when they are asked permission, there was no other reason I started doing candid photos. I started learning more about it online from Youtube mostly, the techniques and thought process, you need to be mentally tough to do candid photography, your morality will be questioned, you need self justification.  

Before that I used to shoot travel and sometimes birds, Flamingos and Ospreys, and I was part of local groups who liked such photos; I even won a bird photography contest; but were not much impressed by candid photos, they liked it if I made them bnw somehow, but no one wanted to give it a try, sun-stars and birds and star trails are their forte, I respect that. And that’s when I started looking at instagram if there are other people doing such stuff in India and came across the community. 

Through these blogs I will like to share what I have learnt from various online and offline sources in my journey, it will of course not be useful to people who are at advanced level but there are many many people like me who do not have a guardian angel and are struggling to get out of all the confusion on social media and the spam of likes making us go randomly like headless chickens.

My journey is ongoing unlike the masters who have reached the pinnacle. It's exciting and I would love to share it with people who are on their own journey and have a more engaging conversation than social media enables.

Footnote: The image used in this post was shot my me in Mumbai in 2018, right when I was transitioning from travel and bird photography into street.

You can reach me at https://www.instagram.com/bhabani.photos/