Studio 5: A Light Through The Cracks

It is difficult to ultimately answer whether we seek to capture a beautiful moment, or if a moment is made beautiful because we have photographed it. And yet, what we find ourselves with is a horizon that slowly hoves into view; a perspective that allows us to gaze over where we have come from, where we are – and where we may go. There is an unbridled tension that simmers underneath the surface, but through those cracks we see a nourishing; a final moment where we confront our tenacity with nature’s unrelenting terror. It is the calamity of life and simultaneously its beauty, where Neha Choksi’s Lone Orange (2008) and Sunhil Sippy’s Oaxaca State (2020) leave us. It is an unforgiving limbo that hangs our spirit in balance – will we triumph, birthing life – or would our landscape decimate into a cold, harsh nothingness?

These photographs meditate upon us a state of calm, a state of reassurance – that subtle hint of warmth which overlaps with our gaze, blurring the boundaries of the known and the unknown, the tactile and the ephemeral, as Shivanjani Lal’s Film Still series (2017) slowly distills. It is a final moment of absence, a lush tree braving its odds against an hostile stillness – incisive with Surekha’s The Whispering Silence Photo-Action (2010) that raises our drooping shoulders and dismayed beliefs, towards optimism.