A ticket to other lives

On Art

A Ticket to Other Lives

Gregarious and passionate, the photographer Aparna Jayakumar has made Doha her new home and hopes the city will serve as a springboard to explore the region and document the lives of its people.

BY AYSWARYA MURTHY PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY APARNA JAYAKUMAR

IMAGE COURTESY OF ALBERT KLEBEL

THE SOLITARY PHOTOGRAPHER "My camera is my access to the world, my ticket to meet different kinds of people. So many people just let you into their lives when you say you want to take their picture."

APARNA JAYAKUMAR’S creative subjects proclaim her penchant for humanism, though that doesn't necessarily come from her training in psychology, she says. Rather, she attributes this interest to her years as a student in some of Mumbai’s more well-known left-leaning colleges.

“Having studied under the likes of Palagummi Sainath, it’s only natural that a level of socio-consciousness and awareness set in quite early,” she says. And Jayakumar’s growing love for the camera helped her focus these energies and gave her a unique perspective on the lives of those she photographed, while living vicariously through

the spectrum of society. She found herself in a solitary bubble that encased her in a moment, a time and place.

“My camera is my access to the world, my ticket to meet different kinds of people, from taxi drivers to movie stars,” says Jayakumar. “So many people just let you into their lives when you say you want to take their pictures. For me it’s important to inhabit different kinds of worlds and photography gives me that opportunity.” Ever since she started shooting with her first camera, a Nikon FM10 that was a gift from her mother when she turned 19, the people of Mumbai became her constant muse. “As a city girl

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MUMBAI MUSE “Goodbye Padmini” maps the story of Mumbai through the legacy of Premier Padmini taxis.

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"As a city girl growing up in such a crowded city, I am not used to empty spaces and don’t know what to do with them."

THE DECISIVE MOMENT Selected works from Jayakumar's various projects:.

Clockwise from top: “Nowhere Land” at a Bollywood film set intended to recreate an Angolan hamlet; “Goodbye Padmini”; Bollywood actor Sonam Kapoor in the publicity still for the film “Mausam”.

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THE BENGALI BABU Jayakumar captures the essense of the typical “Babumoshai”, a middle-aged, middleincome, office-going Bengali man "who dresses like it’s still the '50s, likes to eat rice and fish curry, always with a mishti (sweet) to finish the meal, is ready to engage in longwinded discussions about history and politics, while smoking numerous cigarettes."

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growing up in such a crowded city, I am not used to empty spaces and don’t know what to do with them,” she laughs.

Meanwhile, Jayakumar’s media and film training was rushing her along another route, rather inescapable in Mumbai — Bollywood.

“Through the course of working in advertising film production and commissioned shoots, I ended up in film set photography, a kind of halfway house for me,” says Jayakumar. It was her job to shadow the cinematographer, and shoot stills that one couldn't just grab from the video — capturing the right moments both on and off screen, shooting the cast while they were in costume and in the vein of the film, to stumble upon that defining moment. For instance, Jayakumar says, the poster for the Academy award-nominated “Salaam Bombay” was shot by screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala on the set, a candid still of the kids goofing around during the shoot, which eventually became the face of the film. The first film set she worked on was “Little Zizou” by Taraporevala, Jayakumar’s idea of a Renaissance woman, who was turning director with this comedy about two quirky and embattled Parsi families. An accomplished photographer herself, having held exhibitions across three continents, Taraporevala brought her camera along and took her own pictures during the first few days of the shoot, considering Jayakumar was so inexperienced. “After the first week, when she saw the pictures I had been clicking, she stopped bringing her camera,” says Jayakumar, who, despite several years of experience behind the camera at that point, remembers this as her big moment of validation as a photographer. Several assignments followed, including blockbuster flicks such as the A-list “Kaminey”. “When I saw my stills splashed across giant billboards in the city, it truly started to feel like this was my life now,” she says.

Jayakumar’s long liminal phase as she remained unconvinced of a viable career in photography is unsurprising. Even as she was honing her skills, highresolution camera phones, Photoshop and “young kids with their DSLRs” were starting to take over. “Where does a professional photographer stand in all this? I am still trying to answer that question. I was once asked to submit a budget proposal for a project and since it was a public service campaign, I slashed my fee and quoted a figure that covered purely the cost. They got back to me saying someone’s nephew had a great camera and was willing to do it for free,” she shrugs. “Some people just want decent pictures that are sharp and colorful. They are not really

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that discerning about the eye and the maturity that comes from experience.”

Jayakumar almost prides herself on her embarrassingly poor post-production skills. But then, she is old-school like that: What you shoot is what you have, she says. “If it’s a commercial shoot, I would outsource some of the less basic touchup work. I don’t believe in manipulating an image; I don’t even crop my pictures very much,” she says. A photographer’s job is not just to click pretty pictures but to capture that “decisive moment” as Cartier Bresson believed — an image which defines everything about the situation and tells the whole story in one frame. “Of course, photography has moved on from that, but part of me still believes in it. Because for me, his pictures are timeless and still have the power to move me.”

But it is also an exciting time for photographers. “You can look back at the century and embrace styles and techniques that appeal to you the most,” Jayakumar says.

“People still work with cyanotype, daguerreotype and wet plate collodian, using the earliest techniques and films.

That’s the beauty of photography; it doesn’t matter, as long as you are making something that is meaningful and resonates with the audience.”

Jayakumar talks about one of her most inspiring works, “Goodbye Padmini”. “I have often been asked if “Goodbye Padmini” was inspired by Raghubir Singh’s Ambassador series. I am a huge admirer of his, of course, but this was just a happy coincidence, and nowhere close to what he has done,” says Jayakumar about the project that mapped the story of Mumbai through the iconic taxi. The Premier Padmini, as it is called in Mumbai, was originally manufactured in India between 1964 and 2000 by the Italian company Fiat.

“The charm of the Padmini taxi is unique, with its disco lights, brightly colored seat covers, over-the-top taxi art, icons of various gods, or Bollywood stars (or both side-byside). There is much old-world romance associated with the black-and-yellow taxi — any local will have nostalgic stories to tell about riding around town in a Padmini,” she explains in her picture log. The first taxis arrived in Bombay in 1911.

One hundred years later, the government issued a notice stating that taxis over 25 years old had to be removed from the streets.

“The project started out as a commission for an Italian publisher who wanted to capture the color and kitsch, but I was drawn to the human story, of migrants losing their livelihood with the disappearing taxis,” says Jayakumar.

Through the disappearing taxis, she tells the story of Mumbai — a city in flux, rapidly changing, ever-ready to throw out the old and embrace the new, a city that embraces and glorifies the disparity between the rich and the poor, something that is omnipresent throughout India, but glaringly accentuated in Mumbai.

Jayakumar finds Doha relaxing; Mumbai’s pace was starting to burn her out. It’s also a whole new whole that awaits her and her lens. “I love Islamic architecture and art and the people are so beautiful; I am yet to explore all this with my camera. Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Iran are a photographer’s dream.”

In Doha, after moving out of the “sterile” West Bay, Jayakumar is starting to appreciate the city’s aesthetics.

Already the projects in her head are demanding to be born.

But she is still learning about Qatar, getting accustomed to its people and their stories. It’s a game of patience, after all, of watching and waiting for that one moment.