Loneliness and decay inspire him. In 2015, when he came for the Delhi Photo Festival, photographer, writer Soham Gupta said: “Photography helps me purge all my anger and fear and anxieties, it helps me channelise euphoria as well.” Soham is one amongst 83 artists who have been chosen for the Venice Biennale by curator Ralph Rugoff. Known for his seminal work “Angst” that began in 2013 on the streets of Kolkata in the shades of the night, his essay in nocturnes is a symphony in melancholia.
His subjects are enshrouded in an impenetrable, dolorous black from the shades of night time. In 2018, Soham was selected by The British Journal of Photography as one of 16 emerging photographers from more than 500 nominations made by a global panel of experts. In the same year, his book, “Angst” published by Akina Books was shortlisted for the Les Prix du Livre: Photo and Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles and the Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award.
Just before he leaves for the 58th La Biennale di Venezia, he shares his evolution with us.
We think of Kolkata as a city of vibrant and varied colour, of everyday idioms ravished in exotic hues. But Kolkata for you belongs to the darkened embers, to the dead of night, please tell us about your genesis
In 2013, I got a chance to participate in a workshop mentored by Antoine d’Agata, one of the most radical and important voices in photography today. In what seemed to be endless nights and days, he psychoanalysed me and my batch-mates by asking endless questions. At the end of the workshop, I got to learn more about myself and why I was doing what – and realised I had been unconsciously making images of people at the margins of society for years, because of my own alienation as a frail child and having experienced a turbulent time growing up. My heart howled at the sight of men and women rotting away on the streets, especially with mental illnesses – and it is often a dead-end for most – rotting away, waiting for death to come liberate them.
The cult Bengali singer-songwriter Kabir Suman, who ushered in a renaissance in modern Bengali songs in the nineties was one of the first people here to bring up a conversation and write a song about a mad, homeless man on the streets. The song is etched in my mind since a long time – and makes me uncomfortable even today.
D id dropping out of college at a difficult emotional turning point, create an alchemy of isolation ?
I hated school. I never fitted in. Quite a few of them were really horrible and merciless to me – and if the circumstances had been like it is now, many could have been in trouble. But then, I don’t have a lot of regrets – the ups and downs of life mould us into who we are today, the life experiences shape us, shape our outlook, and shape what we produce. College was fun – because suddenly, there was a lot of independence to express my own views. But the baggage of my past was catching up with me – and as my back hit the wall, there was only one path left for me – photography.
Your texts for your photographs reflect you as a voracious reader. It’s almost as if you bring alive the incantations of 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Would you like to comment?
It is strange that you brought up Baudelaire in the conversation. I love his poetry. And it also happens that Gustave Courbet, who is one of my favourite painters (along with Goya) was loved by Baudelaire, I got to find out sometime back.
Looking at some of your portraits reminds me of “Last Exit to Brooklyn”, by Hubert Selby Jr. Do you agree that there is a similarity?
My work is marked by the same harshness, the same angst that defines Selby’s work. “Last Exit to Brooklyn” is my favourite book.
In Delhi 2015, at your exhibition you had written the words: “But our Calcutta, this crumbling city, it echoes with the cries of pain and the howls of agony, everywhere during heartbreaking winters, when the other half is having the most beautiful time of their lives.” Is Kolkata like an acrid taproot that plays out situational ironies?
Calcutta is a strange place – I don’t know where and how to begin. The opulence and the grandeur – as well as the poverty and deprivation is unlike any other place, I think I should share an anecdote with you.
When I started my journey as a photographer in 2008-09, Lightstalkers was in vogue – and the figures I looked up to in those days were mostly photojournalists, many of them working at that time in the hell-holes of Afghanistan or Iraq. On their website, Lightstalkers made possible for professionals to post updates about their whereabouts and this helped me get in close contact with many photojournalists who passed by Calcutta. The world around me changed – fresh out of school, I was haunting places frequented by the westerners in the city – from dingy, sleazy backpacker paradises to British-era boutique hotels like Fairlawn, back then run by Calcutta’s very dear Mrs. Smith, who in her heydays had hosted Dominique Lapierre, Gunter Grass, Merchant Ivory, Shashi Kapoor and the Kendalls.
I haven’t been to Fairlawn in a long while, ever since they closed the bar downstairs – but on balmy summer evenings, interesting men and women would gather for a drink – typical Graham Greene outsiders: missionaries and their volunteers, the impoverished expat, the homesick backpacker, journalists and photographers – all mingling together in the western oasis of our crumbling Calcutta.
One day, while working as a fixer and having stayed back for a drink, I overheard a most peculiar conversation going on in the next table: a group of middle-aged, affluent gentlemen were comparing experiences in the city – and then raised a toast to poverty. ‘To Calcutta! To Poverty!’ they uttered in unison.
Robert Clive, the architect of the British Empire called Calcutta, ‘the most wicked place in the universe’ and poet Rudyard Kipling named it the ‘city of dreadful night’. However, it was author Geoffrey Moorhouse, who is perhaps more accurate in his description of the city. “Very few people have said anything nice about Calcutta,” he wrote, “unless they were Bengali.”
Calcutta is my beloved city – but apart from being a criticism of the social disparity, my work “Angst” is probably one of the last works to come out of Calcutta which chronicled the effects of the man-made Bengal famine of 1943 as well as the tragic three decades of economic inertia which led to how we are today – even though the city is changing fast, as most of it gets gentrified.
Your images are soul searching–they have an insignia of isolation, of deep despair. The leper playing with his mosaic of memories as he holds on to a doll, and the Durga idol in the dump both speak to us about the decadence of man and time.
The idol in the dump is about many things. At times, religion, devotion –– they seem to be the biggest farce of all – the sight of the autistic teenager in a wheelchair smiling ahead impishly at the alter, his mother with graying hair behind him lost in prayer, the sight of the bitch carrying in her mouth, the limp body of her dead puppy, the sight of endless streams of urine flowing through the gutters, and on its slimy surface, the reflection of the moon – and you end up disowning god in anger.
The leper is a symbol from society but an outcast too. This is about the inward trance of isolation and the acceptance of a life of utter despair .When life’s hard, time’s going slow – the harder it gets, the slower it ticks – until one day, suddenly, it stops ticking altogether, when tears dry up, when hope, like god, is nowhere to be seen, when the numb body can feel burning agony no more, when the body is an empty shell breathing; that’s when madness overcomes you, that’s when you grow wise, that’s when suddenly you forget, that death comes as the end – and unexpectedly, hope rushes to you – on littered streets and stinking fly-buzzing dustbins, on a winter night’s brutal rainfall or a summer afternoon’s flaming streets, when dogs lose their bark and thirsty crows maddeningly search for a drop of water – and – bored folks in the backseat of their air-conditioned cars gaze at you, wondering why such a filthy rotting beast like you is giggling in happiness by the roadside, laugh at the unreasonableness of madness, failing to realize it’s necessity for you to keep living on until the municipality folks on a foggy dawn find you lifeless, clean up the body, cleansing the city’s soul.
(The Venice Biennale has three Indian artists in its exposition - Shilpa Gupta, Gauri Gill and Soham Gupta)
