CONNECTING REMOTELY

Haruki Murakami, whose books are replete with thoughts on the human condition, said, “A person’s life may be a lonely thing by nature, but it is not isolated. To that life other lives are linked.” If the lockdown has taught us anything, it is the significance of human interaction in the workings of our daily lives. It is not just our core group—family and friends—but the stimuli that we receive from being surrounded by people, whether in an office space or taking a walk down the road.Video calling apps and software have always been around, but has now been conferred a new symbolic role. The phone or laptop screen stand in as modern edifices that provide entryways to known and unknown places.In this issue of Better Photography, Conchita Fernandes speaks with six photographers—Zahra Amiruddin, Farheen Fatima, Aashim Tyagi, Jackie Russo, Sephi Bergerson and Nick Fancher—whose images center around distance, longing, anxiety, the inclusion of technology and twisting reality, while they photograph strangers and familiar faces.

Go Away Closer

Zahra Amiruddin takes you through the finer nuances that she uncovered in her remote portraits.

Light and time are two fugitives in the realm of photography. What we see and end up photographing is not quite the same. Every second or a fraction of it that is spent, whether in acknowledging the moment or pressing the camera’s shutter, is time (and light) that is lost. As photographers, we do our best to bring in some semblance between what we see and what we photograph. It is a compromise, or what Zahra Amiruddin likes to call the “in-between” moment.

Zahra’s photographs are not absolute in their rendering. Instead, they convey continuity. It wasn’t any different with her remote portraits, except that she no longer had the virtues and comfort of Bombay’s expansive sea or its invigorating breeze—elements that she goes back to time and again. “Until the lockdown, I would veer towards photographing outdoors more than I would in my own home. With the remote portraits, it wasn’t just about creating ‘pretty pictures,’ but about using the person’s home to exemplify their personality.”