Digitally Inserting Self in the Analogue

I love looking at the photo album that contains all the older pictures of my family. The idea of finding oneself in their family and their past, no matter how much you might hate them, yet they still live in you in one way or the other and might find their way through the fabric of our societal conditioning and occasionally show up in you, was at first appalling to me. Now it’s amusing.

French philosopher Roland Barthes says that every photograph is a moment of time arrested by the camera into the film. When I imagine myself travelling through the albums, I am an entity from a different time-space imposing itself onto the faded photographs of the albums. I thus keep the photographs of my family albums analogic, captured straight from the albums, with my images superimposed onto the analogues, making the difference in time more visible.

In his familial memoir, Running in the Family. Michael Ondatjee imagines his family members forming a large human-pyramid and walking through the walls of his ancestral house. When I imagine mine, the pyramid formed is not made up of humans but of photo albums that hold them all in multiple moments and instances in their pages. All ancestral property destroyed through Partition or land disputes.

Like the delayed rays of a star that reach the earth (Roland Barthes), my family reaches me in these albums through time. To finish half the distance between us, I enter the albums to travel back in time. They’re magical. I become a part of them. An entity out of its time and space stuck inside the photograph, I become the ‘punctum’.

“College”

A generation ago, (1990s) my mom and had a very romantic life where they met each other in college, made friends, fell in love (maybe) and did what every piece of popular media about college portrays college students to be doing, maybe. As I, currently in college myself, live through similar experiences and consider myself and my generation the next great functionaries of the world, I realise that they were the same.

Hangout

As everyone who has seen friend-groups around in campuses and wanted to hang out with them, I try to fit in.

As everyone who has seen friend-groups around in campuses and wanted to hang out with them, I try to fit in.

Ma’s Camera

I wonder what is it that Ma was showing to her now husband (Baba) and best friend. Ma always had a camera with her at any given moment. I would always wonder what is it she captured in them for she never showed me the pictures, it was a secretive affair. Only later did I realise that maybe a lot of these images themselves are taken in those cameras. Now whenever I enter this image, I realise that I will never know what she was showing them. Every photograph is a frozen moment in time, and that is what I am, when I enter these photographs, frozen.

Vacations

My parents have been great travellers. Be it climbing a snowy mountain in Europe or climbing a tree in the middle of a jungle. I travel with them in these photographs. Be it flying into Bbaba head-on at Mount Blanc or sitting on a rock with Ma like I always do whenever we go on forest trips.

Chai

A habit that has not left me since my childhood days is closely observing a cup of chai, whether its milky, salty (saltea?), sweet, whether it has malai (cream) in it or if it is satisfactorily brown enough. This habit originated from by observing Ma’s chai.

Nani Ke Phool

Going yet another generation back, the park behind my Grandma’s house in Lucknow has been there since decades. One of my most favourite hobbies was to collect leaves, flowers, feathers, wrappers from that park. My Grandma yelled at me for this. She likes to keep her house ‘clean’, free of ‘park ki dhool mitti’ (dust from the park). So now I do this more often, just to annoy her.

Peeks

The Allahbadiya side of my family has historically been extremely reserved, secretive, not-so-talkative, scheming(?). All that happened in that house in Allahabad, has remained within the walls of the house there. Now that the house no longer exists, I cannot peek inside it. So, I try peeking into their lives through my Grandma’s anecdotes, my Ma’s childhood impressions, through the photo albums where none of them stare into the camera.

A Marriage Story

My grandparents love telling me about the time when photographs were a very rare, occasional and sporadic event. A camera was not accessible to a middle-class household in Ahallyabai Ghat in Benaras. So here, I often like to travel back to the day Baba’s parents got married in Benaras, and tease my Dadu with the accessibility of selfies I can now take with my phone.

Out of Frame

Ma’s side of my grandparents were a stunning couple. Their wedding photograph hangs to this day on the walls of my parents’ bedroom. Ever present. I have leant on that wall when I read my first books, watched my laptop, scrolled on my phone, cried over the guy I was crushing on in 11th grade. They both have seen me go through all of it. Both of them being very reserved individuals, are very particular about their space. So, I stay out of the frame.

Photo Feature

I enter this next photograph with my DSLR, for she (my Thamma – paternal grandmother) loved to be photographed in studios, in compact cameras, in mobile phone cameras, and now in the albums through which I visit her. She loved getting featured.

Behena

I always end my photo album travels with a culmination of all. The latest development in my family, my younger sister. A true descendant of the family in her love of being photographed. Always ready. I take my DSLR out once again. The photogenic DNA travels through space and time, from the secretive roofs of Allahabad to the very talkative Ahallyabai Ghat in Benaras, to my Grandma’s garden in Lucknow’s Vikasnagar, to Deshbandhu College in South Delhi (ew), and finally to a flat in Navi Mumbai where 1-year old Dhriti Choudhury plays with her God-knows-what while her older brother is too busy puking out his lunch in the bathroom at the time of this photograph being taken. (Thankfully no one captured that).

Savya is pursuing English literature at Shiv Nadar University. This visual project has emerged out of a course on photographic image taught by Sreedeep Bhattacharya.