#Scurf180: Conversation with Mumbai Paused
The man behind the handle Mumbai Paused, Gopal M.S., talks about patterning the mundane in the streets of Bangalore and Mumbai
I’ve crafted a new series of substacks where I will speak with peers about their work — writing, photographing, philosophising, painting, etc. As I evolve in my own writing routines, I’ve felt enriched and educated by these conversations. This is a practice, I believe, I’m setting up mostly to get to know more from and about other writers, artists, photographers through their lives and stories.
You can read the earlier conversations in this series here!
For the fourth edition of Conversation, I caught up with Mumbai-based photographer Gopal M.S., better known as Mumbai Paused on Instagram and X. During the day he works the works at an ad agency; on evenings and over weekends he gets behind the lens, shooting the city, its streets and life. He has been documenting Mumbai since 2009 and Bangalore for around three years before that. He currently lives with his wife and son in Navi Mumbai.
Hi Gopal! I’ve been following your work for the last 5-6 years and have come to know and understand the city of Mumbai through your photographs now. The French writer Georges Perec introduced the term “l'infra-ordinaire” meaning the infraordinary to describe the habitual and ordinary—the opposite of the extraordinary. (Georges Perec – Infra-Ordinary)
“How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.”
— Georges Perec
I believe this term directly applies to your work because your work explores notions of the everyday that are generally seen as banal, commonplace, overlooked, and seemingly inconsequential. Through your photographs you lean towards going beneath the surface, beyond the superficial layer of the ordinary, elevating it through a process of careful looking. Would you agree?
“L'infra-ordinaire” or Infraordinary. What a beautiful term! I am hearing it for the first time, and it beautifully explains what I like to shoot daily. Since I started blogging, noticing something interesting daily and sharing it has become a habit that I enjoy. That also meant that I ended up shooting a lot of everyday things. The commonplace and the overlooked. I think it is the little things that are very much part of our lives as people living in cities in shared spaces. It’s these shared spaces and familiar objects that we all see but don’t always stop to observe that I developed an eye for, I think. The one reason why they can be seen as l'infra-ordinaire is because of the time I have spent documenting them, finding patterns within them and sharing them with the world.
How would you say you got started on this project?
I believe that your work comes from a place of heightened observation. You reveal something about a seemingly inconsequential place, corner, incident, daily activity that would go unnoticed by the average passerby – physical nuances, a certain cadence, a tension between man and woman. With this context could you talk to me a bit about why you chose street photography? Why not another format?
It started sometime in 2005 when my wife gifted me a small Canon Powershot digital camera at a time when it became affordable for people to buy. I was hoping to use it on holidays, shoot images of advertisements from the streets (for my work) and maybe shoot trains. I like trains and wanted to share photographs on a website called IRFCA—The Indian Railways Fans Bulletin Board online. However, I carried the camera in my pocket to work daily and would shoot an image of one of the streets I was passing through. We lived in Bangalore then, and I used to travel to work on a Scooty moped.
After about a month or two, I realised that I had a collection of photographs of the streets of Bangalore, and they were not boring images. They were not as interesting as the images on Flickr, but they did seem to tell a story about a Bangalore I knew. Flickr was a big rage then, with millions of people buying their first digital cameras, like me, worldwide, and there were images from Bangalore, too. But the images from Bangalore were all popular spots in the city for photo enthusiasts, unlike mine. I thought my images were boring but posted them anyway.
However, I also started a blog called Which Main? What Cross? to share my images, where I made it a point to shoot an image a day from the streets of Bangalore. Populating that blog with images is how I learned to see cities, shoot images, and share them with the world. I was sharing images of a different side of Bangalore from the popular narrative but the everyday for its people - the daily things and lesser-known parts of the city, and I started enjoying the process of finding something interesting (to me) everyday.
This is something I do even today, almost two decades later, and enjoy it just as much. I discovered the joy of observing “an inconsequential place, corner, incident, daily activity that would go unnoticed by the average passerby,” and the delicate “physical nuances, a certain cadence, a tension between man and woman, etc.,” that became part of the images was something that happened naturally and happened to become part of the images. I think that also comes from the captions or hashtags that accompany the images, which allowed me to point out these subtle things to the world. Observing the streets over time allows one to develop a certain perspective and empathy for the world and its people.
I also grew up and went to college in Bangalore. Then, moved to Mumbai for work, and the digital camera happened when I came back for a few years to work in that city. Bangalore, like all other Indian cities was going through a massive change, and I could see it both as a person born there and an outsider from Mumbai.
The camera allows one to see the world in a different way, just like writers start seeing the world through words and with a pen.
I love your handle: Mumbai Paused. It is an extension of the core elements of your work. It reflects that if you’ve spent enough time with a place or in a space, you will likely begin to see beyond its social and cultural mores. Seeing your photos of Bombay, one could say that layers of meaning unfold in front of you. How did you arrive at this practice?
Thank you. Yes. That’s the advantage of a long-term project. It is also an impossible project to capture any city as a whole. There is too much happening. But we can peel a place like the layers of an onion.
After I moved here, Mumbai turned out to be more interesting to shoot than Bangalore. You can point a camera in any direction, shoot, and get a story. That is also where the fun part starts - trying to make sense of the noise and the speed of the city. There is a bustling city everyone is familiar with from popular culture and then there is how people experience it.
In Bangalore, I have a moped to explore the city, and in Mumbai, I use public transport. That meant I walked a lot more and a different side of the city. The name Mumbai Paused, came from this - I wanted to paused the city that is always on the move and doesn’t stop for anyone according to popular experiences.
I recently saw this caption recently by writer and journalist Rohini Mohan accompanying a shot of Mumbai:“No other city in India shrinks me like this one does, grows around me and slips underneath me, giant but not monster, unreachable but not unfriendly, always open and yet disorienting. I wonder if I will ever stop looking at #Mumbai City with village eyes.”
What she said perfectly illustrates how many people see this city. The term village eyes is interesting because I have felt while walking around the city with a camera that our large cities are still a collection of small communities that one can give any name—a village, towns, etc.
I don't know if this giant of a city called Mumbai is the creation of its movies, grand novels, books, etc. It may depend on whom one meets in the city and interacts with. But it’s also a city where life spills onto the streets—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Most of it is simple things found all over India and the world, but don’t always spill onto the street and are open for the world to see. Since I shoot mostly streets, I think that side of Mumbai comes through, and that’s the world I like to walk through with or without a camera.
Your photographs show the mundane side to the otherwise storied city of dreams. Why is showcasing this side of the city important?
Even before I picked up a camera, I loved cities, observing urban life, maps, and geography. The camera became a lucky gift that allowed me to see afresh and learn about cities. First of all, I do it for myself. I learn a lot about a place, and it’s fun. Secondly, I get to put it all up there, on the internet. Now that we have a wonderful encyclopedia that can be seen by everyone, I find joy in sharing what I see with everyone. Most of the images I shoot are on the internet within seconds of me shooting them. So, it’s quite a selfish reason for me and people who see the images can see the city or parts of it, wherever they are in the world and feel the love (or hate) for the city.
Some of your photos also display your frustration with the city, its people and its ways. There is also a subliminal undercurrent of personal and daily politics on display in some photos. Would you agree?
I don’t avoid politics and let my views and opinions be known through my choice of subjects, hashtags, and captions. The beauty of photographs is that I don’t scream to convey a message and can let the picture speak for itself.
For example, I use a hashtag called #DalitBlue, where I document imagery found on the streets of Mumbai from Ambedkarite and other Dalit groups and in the localities or even ghettos where they live and work. When one is shooting the streets of Mumbai, it is impossible to notice how the city is full of invisible and visible walls between the rich and the poor and their community identities. Just showing it through images is the least one can do
Our relationship with cars is another favourite topic to explore. As our cities are now designed around flyovers and parking lots for car owners, that’s an interesting cultural issue to shoot.
How can one not be frustrated with how we treat the coastline or the trees? We can convey frustrations like these as stories and images with a photograph.
It comes across from your photographs that you spend a lot of time simply looking. One can see that you’re interrogating these spaces even when you’re not photographing them. How do you go beyond the easier route of taking pictures to make the city look pretty, saddle the captions with cliches or even fetishise its problems?
I love walking around the city and observing things. It is also a daily habit that I have developed. Most days, I don’t even shoot images, while some days, I find enough stories to capture. Observation comes first, and interrogation follows naturally.
To be honest, I would actually like images of ordinary things I shoot to be pretty, and I would love to shoot them better - with better framing or use of light to tell the story better. But to answer your question, it’s about how we react to social media (algorithm?) and try to get more engagement. If the function of a social media project is to get as much engagement as possible, it would make sense to shoot what is popular, use the trending hashtags or make reels that are trending. People who do long-term projects like mine prefer to go slow but steady and do what is best for telling the story.
I’m sure there are areas of Mumbai that you’ve not captured fully in your photographs. What areas are those?
There are large parts of the city that I have yet to explore. I haven’t even been to parts of Dahisar or Mira Road or the suburbs beyond Thane. Within Mumbai proper, every place is changing at such a rapid pace that every time I go back, it feels like a new place! This change is what makes our cities great to shoot, too, so I have no complaints. The fishing villages of Mumbai are places I want to capture in greater depth.
What would you say are the indelible elements of street photography?
Spontaneity. My greatest pleasure is pausing a moment and capturing a frame filled with activity. Often, a photographer discovers many things only after observing the images later and at leisure. These delayed discoveries make street photography fascinating to me.
Somehow your photos have an olfactory sensation to them. When I see some selections of your images, especially on X, I get a feeling that I can smell the place that you’ve photographed. How would you define your instinct to capture such frames?
That has more to do with the city than me. I think allowing a place's rawness to come alive in unedited/photoshopped images does the trick. #Matsyagandha is a hashtag that I use to try to capture the smell of the city. And it’s not all fish.
What are your tools (cameras, apps, softwares)?
My primary camera is my phone (iPhone 13). I also use a point-and-shoot camera—Canon G7X- and recently, a Fuji X T3 mirrorless camera. However, I do not use the last one much for street photography that goes on my blog or social media.
Where has your photography taken you intellectually speaking? Has seeing Mumbai over the years through your lens, changed you as a person? Has it affected how you interact with the city?
Doing something like this does change you a lot. The first casualty of this hobby was my approach to advertising and career. It made me choose a slower and less lucrative professional life. The best part is making friends and meeting new people. I get to meet a lot of people because I have a camera and as I walk around. I recommend carrying a camera and using it as a conversation starter. Then, there are people I meet online and exchange ideas with. Having a hobby and some photographs to show makes it easy for people who have similar interests to find me. Also, since most of what I do is out there in the open, people have a fair idea of who I am and what I believe in. Just like readers and their writers. That’s a win.
Note: All photographs are courtesy the artist.
If you enjoyed this, the next conversation substack will reach you sometime in the coming week!
Thank you, Anandi!