Quiet Songs of Memory

Gareth Phillips speaks to Tanvi Dhulia about his soulful imagery that is driven by instinct and held together by elegant narrations.

- Tanvi Dhulia

For Gareth Phillips, concluding a body of work sometimes means coming to grips with it. “We often— at least, I know I do—hold on to the end longer than we should,” he said at the launch of the first edition of Allegories of Adulation and Woolgathering in Mumbai last year, alongside Anurag Banerjee’s I’m Not Here. “What feels like a natural progression is when it’s made physical in the form of a book. And in no way does it mean that it can’t change or take on another form afterwards.”

What was curious about this event was that the photographers were showcasing “dummies” of their books, which were bound and pasted by hand. At the end of the evening, they simply gave the copies to those who had attended. The decision to give away their work, both of which are deeply personal in nature, was taken quite spontaneously. It was liberating, they said.

Finding Solace

The most challenging aspect for Phillips was facing the pictures that would come together to form Allegories..., a delicate recollection of experiences he had over a span of six months. “There were three different experiences, and each involved a sense of love, loss, and solitude,” he elaborated.

“They were all shot in between with no linear idea as such. They were just reactions to my environment at the time... There was no idea for a book, there was no compulsion to create.”