P O R T F O L I O Paramdeep Singh
CONTENT To learn Architecture : Photography as an Objective tool? Undrgraduate Dessertation
Sigma 100 Strangers Portrait competetion
Mudra - Faceless Expressions Photo Series
Veeram - Motion in stillness Photo Series
Heritage x Fashion Collaboration
36 Days of Type Photo Series
Colourful Archive Series Postcard Series
Photgraphs as a Pedagogical tool CEPT University
Space and Time Research
To learn Architecture:
Photography as an Objective tool?
Paramdeep Singh Dayani Undergrad Desseration
Indubhai Parekh School, of Architecture Rajkot June 2017
Abstract The present architectural photographs share the same language with advertisements and represents buildings as objects in art gallery. But this cannot or shouldn’t be the case, as the photograph itself is to be seen as a reliable record, so how these images or photographs should be? One of the major advantages of capturing architecture in photographs of the present world, it furnishes it with a duplicate one with images. Photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is. The role of architectural photography can be classified and analysed as, in constitution of architectural theory and history, and in contemporary capitalist economy. Photographical image is a substitute for looking at the thing face-to-face. There is no scope of personal interpretation on “production of image”. For Roger Scruton, in Photography and representation it is the object itself which is seen in the photograph not a representation of it, like the view in a mirror. He further classifies it into two more categories, Actual photography and Ideal photography. Where actual photography is the result of the attempts by photographers to pollute the ideal of their craft with the aims and methods of painting. Whereas the ideal photography is the reflection of his mechanical understanding of photography. Thus I quote,” With an ideal photograph, it is neither necessary nor even possible that photographer’s intention should entre as a serious factor in determining how the picture is seen. It is recognised at once for what it is – not as an interpretation of reality but as a presentation of how something looked. In some sense, looking at a photograph is a substitute for looking at the thing itself”. “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” –Susan Sontag, On Photography. Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s cave”, in On Photography, (New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 03.
Plato’s Cave Breaking the preconcieved notion
Plato’s allegory of the cave says you can’t know reality beyond your senses. You’re a prisoner of the human condition
Since the invention of photography, in 1839 people tend to photograph just about everything. It’s an instability of creating a photographic eye, thus changing the notion of the confinement in the cave in today’s world. But photographs have taught us a new visual code. They tend to alter and enlarge our notions, telling us what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe? Moreover they have become grammar and providing ethics of our seeing things. We trust photographs to give us a glimpse of reality, documented moments of time that we can go back to and review. When we come across any information, photographs tend to validate it and becomes the proof of the information presented. All this information aesthetically builds a source of appropriating and appreciating the world as we wish to know it. And alongside this the inert quality of photographs make us believe that we can hold the whole world in our heads/hands. With increasing advancements in today’s technologies the reach is such, eventually shattering the very notion. As collecting and displaying photographs today has become an equivalent of collecting the whole world, which evidently tends to fit in our pockets. This is also because photographs tend to stay, unlike movies and moving images on television screen. As these images become an object, which are light weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry, accumulate and store (with unlimited storage capacity). But not all photographs carry the same meaning and importance for all who see and acquire them. It changes and thus can carry endless amount of meanings, which shows the equivocal magic of the photographic images. Photographs are perhaps very mysterious in nature which more or less make up our environment we recognise today. In its purest of sense photographs capture the experience, thus making the camera a tool of consciousness. When we photograph anything we in a way appropriate the thing captured by giving it our attention and importance. It means putting ourselves in a certain unique relation with the world that feels like knowledge, therefore it asserts power. Photographs tend to make a habit to abstract the world into a printed one, eventually fuelling the present so called ‘modern; inorganic society. In the quest of capturing the world these photographic images have become an important part in knowing the look of the past and the reach of the present. This is because photographs are not statements, but they come out as a piece of the world, ready to be possessed.
Transparency Layers of a photographic image
Photography and the cinema...satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. The photographic image is the object itself. -ANDRE BAZIN, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image�
The transparency of the photographic images is in the reference to the different layers included in an image that one must understand and come across, in order to understand it in a much deeper sense. Photography as a medium and a tool, can be used as a method of explaining the world to ourselves, than explaining it to someone else. But again, this is very subjective way of looking at it and will vary from person to person. But that’s the nature of the tool that it has both objective and subjective nature, and both of them come across very prominently. And it is necessary to understand the subjective nature of the photographs to find the relevance of the objective nature in the field of architecture. In order to understand it with an unbiased eye one should talk about the point of transition when the photography was invented and the transition from the paintings trying to be realistic to acquiring the real image. In realism, the quest of a painter to create a socalled ‘real’ image lead to the invention of the camera obscura wherein later photography came out as a realistic art. But there is more to the realism of photography than the style-realism. In a way photographs seem to provide a deeper connection to reality with respect to the painting or drawings or any other representation technique. Photographs seem to provide some special connection to the world, even when they are not especially style-realistic. As Kendall Walton in his thesis states. Photographs are transparent. We see the world through them. My claim is that we see, quite literally, our dead relatives themselves when we look at a photograph of them.
The point here to understand the most neglected layer when we look at a photograph. We actually do not see the photograph itself, the opaque print. But we actually see the object or person or building, inside the photograph. Placing oneself into the space and looking at the object captured. But when we look at a realistic painting the connection to the subject ceases, as we came to know the image is a painting, an interpretation of an artist and display of his skill and vision. Whereas in case of photographs this subjective intervention is out of the context making us more connected to the image of the object captured. But even Walton would agree, that looking at a photograph of an object and looking at the object in real is a different feeling. It is not just like looking at something
Abstraction Manipulating power of the toolv
Plato’s allegory of the cave says you can’t know reality beyond your senses. You’re a prisoner of the human condition
The technical features of the camera allow the photographer to capture the same scene in various ways and can create distinct effects. Besides the decisions of the photographer, light and weather conditions, which are non-controllable also determine the look of the image. Also the optical capabilities of the lenses are limited as they distort the view in alliance with the perspective. This alignment with the perspective gives photography the power of representing real objects in the form of arranged geometrical compositions. Susan Sontag argues that photography abstracted and distorted the reality into a systematic composition in accordance with the laws of perspective besides individual perception of the photographer. Therefore, even the most technical photograph appear as an object of aesthetic enjoyment. As Sontag says; […] it is now clear that there is no inherent conflict between the mechanical and naïve use of the camera and formal beauty of a very high order, no kind of photograph in which such beauty could not turn out to be present: an unassuming functional snapshot may be as visually interesting, as eloquent, as beautiful as the most acclaimed fine-art photograph.
Photography also gave way to the burning of a new aesthetic, different from the traditional and which undoubtedly affected and was affected by modern art movements, such as Cubism or abstract expressionism. One of the prominent examples of that would be the photographic works of the painter David Hockney. The Susan Sontag’s reference of the photograph’s inherent tendency of beautification, brings in another philosophy of aesthetics known as the “Wabi-Sabi”. Wabi-Sabi is a Japanese word roughly translated as ‘imperfect aged beauty’. It is used to describe a particular philosophy that beauty can be found in the old, the everyday, and the imperfect. Wabi-Sabi photography, then can be said to be noticing and capturing this beauty, for others to see. So it is a way of seeing the beauty in common items and scenes, beauty that is often overlooked simply because it is not where you expect to find beauty. Comparing here the ideas of Scruton about the aesthetic quality of the photography can be fruitful for understanding Sontag’s view. Sontag’s conception of beautification clearly opposes the Scruton’s categoriza
Anti-space a prelude to the conclusion
“Decisions about growth patterns are made from two-dimensional landuse plans, without considering the three dimensinal relationship between the buildings and spaces and without a real understanding of human behaviour. Therefore what emerges in most environmental settings today is unshaped anti-space� -Finding Lost Space. Roger Trancik
The drawings that we majorly use to visualise buildings or spaces in architecture are mostly a two dimensional representation. So are the photographs, a two dimensional presentation and the third dimensional relationship between buildings, space, time and human is up to the visual imagination. This imagination is seldom without a real understanding of human behaviour. Thus whatever we observe today in most settings is an unshaped Anti-space. The above statement is inspired by the theory of Anti-space by Roger Trancik in his book “The lost space”. The real understanding and influence of the space over the human interpretation is fairly neglected. How we behave in a space is largely derived of how much the space affects us. The way one learns to read drawings is by first looking at the set of lines on a paper and trying to understand what they are trying to convey. But only after when one experiences the space which is represented as a set of lines on a paper, one understands its meaning and eventually building a visual skill of perception. This visual skill then can be used in reverse to put one’s imagination on to the paper and let others know what is visualised in one’s imagination. This back and forth process is necessary to learn to convey the thoughts onto the paper, and the efficiency to transfer the thoughts can be increased by increasing the skill of visual perception. But no matter what there is always some subjective interpretation which will vary from person to person. So in trying to bring forward a better understanding of a space while reading a photograph, a couple of questions arise. Is there any influence of the space over the person perceiving the space and eventually trying to present it by capturing a photograph? Moreover, with the changing viewers of a photograph, can there be any constant found between the process of attempting to present a space and reading it eventually? To answer the first question an experimental exercise was conducted with around 30 photographers who were not related to the field of architecture and were gathered in our campus i.e. Indubhai Parekh school of Architecture. With a basic introduction to architectural photography, they went about clicking the spaces whereas without their knowledge their movement and behaviour were keenly observed. Then after a brief period they were gathered and were asked, a series of questions such as which was the first click? What
Conclusion Photography and specifically architectural photography appears as a crucial tool for architecture, in terms of presenting an architectural space and also conveying the ideas behind the design process. Photography is capable of creating exact visual records of the spaces which makes medium most suitable presentation technique amongst other representation techniques, especially for the end product of the architect. This exactness shows the potential of the photographic images, to create reliable and objective images of an architectural space. This study questions the objectiveness of the architectural photographs by showing the artistic tendencies behind the production of the image. The influence of the photographer and his pre-production decisions like framing, position, lighting, etc. are overviewed. Then the abstraction power of the tool to help us understand the possibilities of documentation is discussed. The influence of the viewer, which just focuses on the similarities and excludes the alien ones and thus causing a reductive understanding of architecture through photographic images, where a building is seen as a commodity as the layers of social and political dynamics behind architecture are excluded. Photography is used as a tool of highlighting the product which is building in that case and thus, the spatial experience of the building is reduced to those promotional images. But with the help of other mediums such as narration, it can evoke the physical experience of the space which is lost in a photograph. Intention is not to underestimate the power of the image but to criticize the common tendency. The importance of visual data for architectural disclosure cannot be ruled out. Photographs can be used to trigger desire for architecture like the advertisements that creates desires for products. This study tries to show that photography is not a passive documentation tool and thus can be seen in further depth to have a deeper and vivid architectural disclosure. In addition, photographers’ imagination and perception can also evoke critical perspectives.
Works cited - Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A pattern language: towns, buildings, construction. New York: Oxford U Pr., 2010. Print. - Barthes, Roland. Camera lucida: reflections on photography. London: Vintage, 1993. Print. - Berger, John, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis. Ways of seeing. London, England: British Broadcasting Corportion, 1973. Print. - Ching, Francis D.K. Architecture form, space, & order. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015. Print. - Cokun, Esatcan. Documentation of Architecture: Photography as an objective tool? December 2009. Thesis - Damisch, Hubert. “Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image.” In Classic Essays on Photography, edited by Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1980, 287-290. - Dziga Vertov’s the man with the movie camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. N.p., n.d. Web. - Pitkar, Yashwant, and Mustansir Dalvi. The romance of red stone: an appreciation of ornament on Islamic architecture in India. Mumbai: Super Book House, 2010. Print. - Scruton, Roger. “Photography and Representation.” In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noéel Carroll and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006. - WWSontag, Susan. Susan Sontag on photography. London, Great Britain: Allen Lane, 1978. Print.
Sigma 100 Strangers Portrait competetion
Nominated in
Top 3 accross India
MUDRA - Faceless Expressions Photo Series
VEERAM - Motion in Stillness Photo Series
Heritage x Fashion Collaboration
A colllaboration with NSD Rental Hub The Idea was to Juxtaposee the modern micro paterns with the intcate carvings in the heritage facade. Model : Shreya Pandit
36days of type Photo Series
A Graphics design self inflicted callenge to try and merge Typography with Photographs considering Elements, Shapes, Composition and Identity.
Colourful Archive Series Postcard Series
Trying to give more graphical merit to Photgraphs that highlight a still | precious moment
Photographs as a Pedagogical tool CEPT University
PLAY : WORK Unit teacher : Aparajita Basu Unit Assistant : Paramdeep Singh Dayani FD LVL 2 Spring 2019 CEPT University
Photography has been taken for granted since now everyone holds a camera in their pocket and has endless capacity of taking photos. This has resulted in dilution of the actual potential that real photography as a tool holds. Walk-through the CEPT campus and try to see and capture the elements/spaces usually missed out in daily life Part A – PLAY: WORK - Point of view Take 3 Photographs each depicting Point, Line, Place/Surfaces i.e. 9 photographs in total. Draw illustration on a 6”x6” cartridge paper for each of the photographs taken. Print the photos in A5 size and mount them on the buff board. Each plate after mounting with have 3 photographs/illustrations of Point, Line and plane respectively. Format: A5 size photographs, 6”x6” illustration Upload date - 16th Feb 1 pm Part B – PLAY: WORK - Frame of Mind TIME PROBLEM: 1 HOUR (7th February 2019 - 4.00 pm to 5.00 pm) Make a view-finder with a stiff material which you can hold in your hand easily. Take 5 photographs with your frame in hand which comprises of the content of the photograph you actually want to take. Then followed by the photographs without the frame showing the actual photo you intended to take. You need to be conscious about the frame and its orientation with respect to the subject. The position of the camera, its angle, position w.r.t the subject and orientation is what one needs to be aware of while doing this exercise. Format: 5 A4 paper, each having 2 A5 photos of with and without the frame. Upload date - 16th Feb 1 pm
POINT
LI
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PLANE
Space and Time Research
Mill owners Building Le Corbusier, Ahmedabad
Premabhai Hall
B V Doshi, Ahmedabad
Photography and specifically architectural photography appears as a crucial tool for architecture, in terms of presenting an architectural space and also conveying the ideas behind the design process. Photography is capable of creating exact visual records of the spaces which makes medium most suitable presentation technique amongst other representation techniques, especially for the end product of the architect. This exactness shows the potential of the photographic images, to create reliable and objective images of an architectural space. The drawings that we majorly use to visualise buildings or spaces in architecture are mostly a two dimensional representation. So are the photographs, a two dimensional presentation and the third dimensional relationship between buildings, space, time and human is up to the visual imagination. This imagination is seldom without a real understanding of human behaviour. Thus whatever we observe today in most settings is an unshaped Anti-space. The above statement is inspired by the theory of Anti-space by Roger Trancik in his book “The lost space”. The real understanding and influence of the space over the human interpretation is fairly neglected. How we behave in a space is largely derived of how much the space affects us. In Architecture we usually get inspired by the spaces created by legendary architects. For example Le Corbusier, who is considered one of the biggest pioneers of the Modern movement. The spaces created by him in all his building followed a very strict system of proportions, which was a big revelation during his time. Now these spaces can be experienced through photographic images based on the perception of the actual space and how it is captured through a camera. The question is can these set of images put up together in a different way to perceive a different architectural disclosure? Here are two images of one of his building, Ahmedabad Textile Mill-owner’s Association. Where the first image simply faces the city, and the second image faces the river. Both images are taken looking at two opposite direction, but when we try to place them together the viewer can simulate a panoramic experience through the collage. At some level the space is distorted and a different ‘Anti-space’ is created for the viewer to experience. Now when these images are switched in terms of its position and placed together to create an experience or a space which only resides in the photographic image. As the transparency of the images combine with the abstraction power of the photographic images, one can have a completely different
architectural disclosure. The importance of visual data for architectural disclosure cannot be ruled out. Photographs can be used to trigger desire for architecture like the advertisements that creates desires for products. Therefore, photographs which are exact representation of a space in a 2 dimensional form. It is essentially a piece of paper with a certain layer of information, but a very significant layer is missed out because of availability of cameras. The layer of time is usually taken for granted or rather left unnoticed. Time can be in reference to 3 perspective, the object captured, the viewer and the photographer. With a constant influx of information in terms of photographs have reduced the amount of time a viewer and a photographer spends in front of the space in a single photograph.
So inspired from the works of Abigail Reynolds, an attempt is made to emphasise on the layer of time by overlaying two photographs of same space taken decades apart to make the viewer to dwell deeper and longer looking at the photographic image. The photos used her are of Premabhai hall, located in Ahmedabad designed by the 2018 Pritzker winner B.V. Doshi which currently is not in use. The interior spaces with the surrounding spaces of the building has changed drastically over the years. So after acquiring images of the interior spaces with the surrounding, a certain cuts and folds technique is used to bring both the images together. The working method described by Reynolds is very precise, ‘Imagine a chessboard. Now, if you cut all the black squares into an x—you slice them all straight across—and you fold out the flaps, you would exactly cover all the white squares. If you do that to two chessboards and merge them, you could have an entirely black chessboard, but if you folded the flaps the other way it would be entirely white. Both hessboards are present simultaneously.’ ‘In cutting and folding these images, I’m not privileging one moment over another because they’re both simultaneously present, and though as a viewer you can’t actually fold down the flaps, you can move in relation to the image and see what’s there, so in a way you are in two moments—your present moment of looking contains these two photographic moments. ‘You have to puzzle the folds out and work out what belongs to what, which really slows you down. For me that’s a way of prolonging the moment of looking, where you lose your sense of time.’ The process of observing a photograph and its implications from the point when the image was conceived in the mind can be divided into three parts. For a single photograph can be divided as the still, the dynamic and the hidden still. The still here is the object itself not the photograph but the image of the object that is captured and thus is still on a piece of a paper. For example, in a photograph of Taj Mahal, the photograph is not the still as an object but the Taj Mahal is the object captured and that remains still. Thus the still varies from photograph to photograph, but for a single photograph it never changes. Thus the photographs are referred as still images. On the other side of the photograph is the dynamic, which in most of the case refers to the viewer. The viewers always keep changing, and also the setting around which the photograph is seen i.e. in a museum hung on a wall or in a book with various other text and photographs surrounding it. There is a long debate about the nature of a photograph, of it being subjective or objective.
But it has both the qualities regarding the different point of views. From the point of view of having a still which is an unhindered image of reality photographs are largely objective. But when looked at the viewer’s point of view, the dynamic always changes, and along with it the point of view that person carries, thus making it very subjective. And between these two layers lies the third one, the hidden still. This can be the one way to say that photographs are subjectively objective. In a simplistic manner it can be seen as the photographer and the settings around him which makes him capture the image in that particular manner. “There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.” – Ansel Adams