Ponderings on the light in the shadows
Centre for Photography as an Art Form
National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021
December 20th to 31st, 2005
A space, an object otherwise everyday ordinary becomes magical, poetic, stark, abstract. This is the magic of the light.
Amongst the various shades of black and grey, amongst the darkness and the calm the light leaves its mark. Sharply lit, accurately chiseled little openings of intense activity, of perspective, of lost spaces, of nostalgia. Little jewels of light and shadow that ripple out on floors and climb up the walls, of spaces overwhelmed by the graphic patterns of the light and the shadows, of textures sharply burnt into focus…………………of moments of ponderance.
The shadows by their very nature are ruthless, they are precise, exact two dimensional representation of their three dimensional sources and they may or may not have the slightest resemblance to their very origins and in this abstraction lies one of the keys.
The image thus is often a distortion, surreal, or an image that takes on a new identity of its own, a changed view point, a different perspective.
This joy of shooting, this almost instinctive capturing of light , of shade and shadow in a ‘nature mort’, the playing with perspective come perhaps from my training and work as an architect; the study of sciography, of built and unbuilt form,of architectural masterpieces, the way the light enters these spaces the way it is left out, the shadows created.
The subjects I choose are ordinary everyday objects, lost spaces, little obscure openings, ordinary details, subjects that are unknown, simple, the kind that are taken for granted, where people may pass by for a life time and not notice them.
But then the way the light falls on them, the shades and shadows created, the textures that seem to manifest themselves from nowhere make it the most extraordinary, the most lively and that is what I try to capture.
These images like others are decisive moments captured on film. Some of these moments are of the split second type, they come as a wonderful surprise, as a little opening in a solid wall, as a rain water spout burnt into focus by the afternoon sun. The others come about simply by coming back at another time of the day, by seeing a roof in construction and wondering what patterns the unrelenting mid day sun would create in the space inside.
These are moments that come about through being around, by looking at the way the sun rises and sets, the shadows it makes, the way the light and its shadows move, the way the texture of the surfaces is burnt by the intense rays of the afternoon sun.
Most of all for me they come about through ………………….. p o n d e r i n g
Peeyush SEKHSARIA