#Scurf119: On old photos
Some day I will scour through and share all the photos I've taken in the last decade, but for now these words will suffice
Before we get started: send this newsletter as a gift or directly to as many readers in your life while it’s still free! Later this year I plan on starting paid subscriptions. Share this with the readers in your life, the person who loves wordy texts, and verbose essays about everyday feelings and unexpressed emotions. Thank you for building the scurf community. Another deep dive coming up later this week. In the meantime, let’s talk about old photos.
Today as Google photos reminded me of this day five years ago it showed me a picture of a lamp at my closest friend’s house. The picture was nothing great unto itself, just remarkable in capturing the precise way in which the light from the lamp cut the room in two crescents. My then two year old iPhone 5s’s lens was not yet broken. I was new to the city of Delhi, freshly back from an south Indian city and living with a friend.
As I paused the carousel on Google Photos and traveled to the “view this day” feature, a stylish but sludgy, witless, day revealed itself. I had made not one but five different photographs of the lamp. In the photos I regarded the way the lamp visibly cast its glow into the quiet corner of the room. I don’t know if my friend was with me that night, but the lamp in sight served as a near constant reminder of his astute taste. In that reminding me of how old photos resemble patterns, soirees, séances for mouldy memories, patchy conversations, incomplete interactions. Helena Fitzgerald in her Substack writes how old photos are love stories.
As I gazed deeper into the photograph I felt mentally transported to that moment in which I framed the scene. I remember being in that specific minute, balancing a chilled beer mug in one hand, my phone in the other and looking at the lamp from various angles. I peered through the window inside the living room, as the lamp shone its way. I peered from the sofa sideways, allowing the light to fall on my sallow face and then from the mattress across from it. Basking in the complete, cinematic glory of the light imposing itself every so softly inside the mellow corners of the room. It has just rained and in its wake the evening was purging to be balmy, an inky blue sky sheathing the city all over.
I could instantly recall the physical craving I felt to watch a moody, dank film, situated somewhere along the edges of my memory’s peripheries. I remember swiftly switching between apps, holding my gaze still and so strictly on the lamp, and fishing out a slightly crackling, balmy trailer of Chungking Express. I had the movie memorised image-by-image, word-by-word even though I don’t understand Chinese. Something about the way the lamp’s light showed itself off in the room reminded me of Wong-Kar Wai’s visual temperature. In that moment the movie and the lamp bled into one another, helping me purloin a private joy.
At the time, the substance of that specific moment with the lamp for me was so richly suffused with an animal, primordial need to document it. Today I wonder why I documented it at all. Why write, photograph at all? Those photographs have an air of being simultaneously poignant and inconsequential, making me wonder how the moment must’ve passed in a blip, when the bell would’ve rung and my friend would’ve returned from work. Or when I would’ve been pulled out of the fugue and into the morasses of something more banal, quotidian. Or maybe when I would’ve found another muse (my toes or the wrinkled state of the bedspread).
But those pictures remained.
They remained as souvenirs, bookmarks and totemic relics of moments that I felt were paramount. An instant of the mind and body coalescing into one and creating a sample proof — an image, a tweet, a blog (like this one) — that this moment existed. That when it happened I had wanted to frame it. I had the will to freeze it, for I assumed that it will be of some importance to me. It might be of aesthetic essence of emotional value or merely something that left me with a bittersweet aftertaste. Reminding me of how mostly nothing stops, but sometimes it does and makes everything else look grand.
And I’m not alone in this. My friend Vikram Shah does the same by way of his sparse social media outings. Framing seemingly everyday, random moments and hanging them liked framed prints on his virtual wall for us to ponder upon. They feature a spread of places — physical and metaphorical. Ranging from the ravenous Bombay beaches, to his barsaati’s sprawling balcony in Delhi. There is an invisible cadence to each of them, a song that warbles out only if you’re paying attention.
The process behind Vikram’s and my own photographs also chimed in with a book I recently reread and enjoyed. Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975). While it made me reminisce fondly about my days of traveling to places far and unknown, of being in the whereabouts of new cafés, strangers, and stories. It also inspired me, all over again. While I came across Perec’s writing only in 2019, I now reckon that I have always been subconsciously thinking in his ways. Determinedly applying his psycho-geographical approach to the places I see, people I meet and things I did.
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is an essay, a little book. Through it we read Perec indulge in a psycho-geographical exercise, an attempt to record the very minutest of details of his three-day long sojourn of being seated in a café at Place Saint-Sulpice. He watches, noting the minuscule unravel around, everyday events transpire. He calls its an inventory, writing: “In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential.”
In that I realise that be it blogging, taking photographs or seducing a moment into a few words in the form of a Tweet, writers like Lauren Elkin’s, Perec’s and I are attempting is cataloguing the seemingly banal, to remove layers (later or now) and find traces of something less ordinary. While this process can often be unrelenting, intolerable and unending, for our ilk it is a source of comfort, revelation and quiet jubilation. This near constant cataloguing has fulfilled that primordial, raw need within me, that I don’t always recognise, but often run into.
In Perec’s essay each entry files dutifully the time, date, location, and weather for the moments it plans to capture. It then goes on to detail in its own, often overlapping ways, how people cruise through the every day. Seemingly mundane, even obscure details like pigeons flapping, an inventory of red bags around, number of buses whooshing by make appearance in this index. But Perec also simultaneously philosophises, ruminating albeit in a reporter’s fashion, questioning patterns, recognising the hyacinthine, natural ways in which we choose to ignore the seemingly conspicuous activities around.
This, I realise, is something I have always done as a reader. Peeling the layers, going beyond the surface, looking around the edges, dipping my toes into quagmires to reveal something, anything that could be of little to no consequence for me or anyone, for that matter. This is also something that avid photographer and chronicler of Mumbai Gopal M.S. does through his work. His recent photograph of windows of a massive residential complex so inherent to the fabric of Mumbai, presented without a caption speaks volumes unto itself.
At an artistic plane, this kind of obsessive list-making, journaling often conjures up the rhythm of everyday observances, consisting usually of banal events, inconspicuous absences, overwhelming presences, nurturing habits and protected peace. But for each entry made by Perec, as for each photograph lodged in my phone’s memory, or those from Gopal’s or Vikram’s feed, there are stamps that add value (or not).
For each newsletter, for instance, on Scurf, the app gives me the date, time and location. It also allows me to tinker with other details like the location, weather, etc. When you read the newsletter you get a bevy of emotions flooding my words, floating along in time and space, reaching you in places far and wide. It’s also a particular kind of privilege to be able to detach oneself from the immediate consequences of the little tragedies around, witness private inclusions and exclusions from so person.
As a writer, photographer, artist, this kind of sheltered anonymity, protective apathy is nurturing, even a form of deep caring. I appreciate these little moments a lot more than most other people, I feel a little extra, I bruise, too, a tad generously. And perhaps it shows in the overflowing words, the bountiful writing, the buffet of inspirations that are often a result of with relinquishing control (of my feelings, surroundings) for those few moments. There’s beauty in the obvious too, much like in the sought, the hidden and the forbidden.
Perec writes, “What's really going on, what we are experiencing, the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?”
Perhaps you can join Perec and me in this inconsequential quest.
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