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Candid camera
"Calicut, Kerala", 1975... celebrating an everyday event.
THIS is not a representative collection of the works of one of the country's best-known photographers, but a selection spun around a single theme — "simple, ordinary people", who in T.S. Satyan's words have been the subject of his "intimate intrusions".
The limits the nature of the work even though the book is designed as a sweeping journey through life itself — the black and white photographs ordered somewhat unimaginatively to begin with shots of new-borns and to end with scenes of death.
"Mysore", 1998.
This is a happy book, a quiet celebration of survival and endurance, a demonstration that it is possible to be surprised by the real, a reminder that we should not lose the capacity to marvel at the everyday.
It is remarkable how similar the 148 or so photographs in the book given that a number of them were taken almost 40 years apart. One reason for this is that Satyan's work is less about experimentation and technique and more about resonance and mood.
In his hands, photography seems to be essentially, and above all, an approach for personal expression. Not surprisingly, the pictures in this book are devoid of any real socio-political or historical content. They don't provide us with a grammar or ethics to see them. Although it is a visual document of the country's people, the book does not reveal what shaped them. <243>But in the smiling faces, the furrowed brows, the shy glances and the intense stares lie a glimpse of how India wears its attitude as it works, plays, relaxes and grieves.
If photojournalism is the attempt to capture the moment (that decisive fraction of a second which invests an event with significance) and pictorialism is the attempt to establish photography as an art form, then this book falls squarely into the latter category.
If you are prepared to ignore the thematic triteness and the fact that the pictures are suffused by an old-fashioned sentimentality, then In Love With Life is good example of photography that evokes warmth and compassion by capturing a mood.
In Love With Life, A Journey Through Life In Photographs, T.S. Satyan, Simova Education and Research, Bangalore, 2002, p.180, Rs. 1,200.
MUKUND PADMANABHAN
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