How do we visualise images before we photograph? Don McCullin, a renowned war photographer once said, “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures." With today’s deluge of images, the artistic ability to visualise has to take the driver’s seat.
A few years ago, I was photographing in a secluded village in Thiruvarur district for a story on water scarcity. On a sunny afternoon, I visited an old house to hear about how the lack of rainfall had affected livelihoods. The house had a beautiful courtyard with a metal rod across the periphery to take a swing.
During a conversation with the head of the house, he showed me a chapter called Viradaparuvam from Mahabharata that they recited to implore God to bless them with sufficient rains.
Vanchinathan, a fragile person in his 80s was sitting next to a wooden pillar reciting this chapter from their family’s few decades-old book. The afternoon sunlight entering through the courtyard lit him and the book in a melancholic way. After photographing this moment, I was looking for better frame, the one that would tell a story.
I was visualising a frame that would convey hope and belief. I tried asking him politely to sit on the swing, but he couldn’t hear me. I had to eventually get the people in the house to request Vanchinathan to move closer to the swing. The resulting frame would capture the ‘feeling’ I wanted to convey, with the book and desk in the foreground, and Vanchinathan sitting behind it in the background.
I couldn’t accomplish this due to his old age restricting his mobility considerably. I was scouting around that place looking for a different composition when a momentary action took me by surprise.
Vanchinathan got up from his place, inched slowly towards the swing and sat on it without anyone’s help. I took a moment to recognise the accidental opportunity at my ‘perfect frame’. While I was trying to compose the book in front of him, he moved a little to his right to sit exactly behind the book. I was able to capture a moment that I visualised.
At times, the moments that culminate at the photograph are often as touching as the artefact produced.
The month-long travel for a photo story on failed monsoon showed me the complex relationship that we share with nature and the extent of hope and belief that we have on it.
A few days after I captured this moment, I heard the sad news that Vanchinathan had passed away due to old age.
It took a few days to come in terms with the situation especially when the person who gracefully obliged for a photograph through what I would like to call a telepathic connection, passed away.
May his soul rest in peace.
(The author is an award-winning nature photographer and co-founder of the Youth for Conservation. In this monthly column he talks about his passion for nature, photography and conservation.)
