Little Pockets of Eternity

The Photography Workshop is the Website of Mumbai-based photographer Kedar Kulkarni. You can see his personal gallery here, and particularly his beautiful photos of small town India here. Kulkarni also runs workshops for other photographers and posts their works. For today, see images from the site taken by Dinkar Patil. In November 2014, Patil captured the animate, the inanimate and the people along the Narmada River, all interacting in the breathtaking regional environment and eternal light of India. This was Patil's Roadtrip Series 5:

The walking part of the journey began in Vadodara, Gujurat, India and ended in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India. A total walking distance of 800 kms that was completed in 32 days, with rest stops, with an average of 30 kms, walked per day for a total per day, walking time of between 7-8 hours.

Patil does something curious here. Stone gods clustered in corners come alive, while the landscape's living inhabitants begin to look fixed and permanent. It is a fascinating swap.

Patil's style is un-photoshopped, anti-glossy, uncontrived. It could be Kulkarni's influence, who lists his great inspirations in the history of photography here. Patil's photos take the viewer back to a time when we still believed in a reality, served by the camera. From the dawn of photography, photos documented interactions between an artist, a tool, and the environment. At that time, we kept track of things, rather than things keeping track of us. We were the actors and agents, not our tools. By contrast, in today's graphics, the camera dominates the photographic story. We are no longer watchers, we are watched. Cameras and other tools for seeing (and spying) oppress us in an endless House of Mirrors with meta-visions and meta-narratives. Thankfully, that is not the case here: in Patil's work, some little pockets of eternity slip through his lens.