A Talk by Randhir Singh at SEA
Nirmohi Katrecha,
Randhir Singh is an architectural photographer based in New Delhi, India. He graduated in 1999 as an architect, and pursued his interest in photography by taking a continuing-education course at the International Centre of Photography in New York. Randhir Singh opened his discussion by speaking about about non-duality and negotiation, questioning the role of architecture in the formation of one’s identity, national identity as modern people post freedom. He stated that the role of a photographer is interpreting architecture, as the idea of modernity spreads through photographs.
Photographs are always biased, hence the role of a photographer is extremely critical. Randhir’s first series of photographs included shrines. In an extremely planned neighbourhood in Delhi, there was a titled shrine that stood into the sidewalk and the road. Here, he talked about non duality and duality – ‘non duality’ being the object that defies the street, whereas the ‘duality’ being that it was neither on the street nor on the sidewalk. The second image of the same series being a shrine across the same street, and understanding how objects play roles in their landscapes. He also photographed a series of water towers through the city looking at them as markers throughout the city. The relation of height of the water towers to the housing around it, he suggested, reflected Nehru’s vision for modern India.
Photographing the CPWD colonies to him was an attempt at understanding everyday modernity. He believes that housing is an off shoot of modernity. He considers CPWD to be the first exposure to modernism where community living became the marker of modernism in space planning. CPWD neighbourhood therefore becomes a very integral part of city. Apart from these, he also displayed his photographs from the Igualada Cemetery by Enrique Miralles and the Bait au Rouf Mosque by Mariana Tabatsum in Bangladesh, where he pointed out how the material and the geometry works together and plays an important role. He concluded the presentation by showing the photographs from his exhibit at the Dhaka Summit.
Lastly, the audience interaction also gave rise to discussions about the life of the pictures from CPWD projects, on how they express life without capturing people in them. The clothes hanging, the gamlas (flower pots), they expressed the rhythms, battles and gestures of everyday life. The CPWD project also evoked a strong idea of optimism, for the projects to make a better place for the people, for them to shape the way Indian societies were emerging. He also talks about the difference between an image and a photograph when questioned about how he thinks photographs convey information, stating that an image is about the information, however, a photograph has thickness, weight, smell, form, shape, and it is not about the information. The photograph is an opinion.
The talk touched upon various aspects of photography and urban landscape in architecture, and how photography becomes a medium to express opinions by making of an image.
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