In the Presence of Absence

Nitesh Mohanty dwells on how the brightness of life and the inevitability of death influences his way of seeing.

- Nitesh Mohanty

She would often ask me, “Why do you photograph me so much?” Although I’d always shrug away without giving her a definite reply, we both knew the answer. Isn’t it strange how much we understand the unspoken…? I’ve often found silence an inexplicably powerful tool of expression. Perhaps much in life is enunciated through the implied instead of what’s spelt out in words.

The dreamlike, silent moments from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the vast passages through which we confront time sculpting itself to form poetry out of the remnants of his memory. The silence between two notes of a piano from the Gymnopedies of Erik Satie often reminiscing things that we might have lost over the many monsoons of our life. The invisible coats of silence painted upon the colour fields by Mark Rothko... I’ve discovered much within the presence of absence.