About my Photographs

Jyoti Bhatt

When compared to painting, sculpture and printmaking, photography is a recent form of visual art. It is practiced today – perhaps much more than any other form of art-- by a large number of people, and has diverse kinds of use in various fields including journalism, science, medicine and defence. It could be due to its popularity and familiarity that people have so many different conceptions about photography. Like the six blind men and their different perceptions about an elephant, people often have pre-conceived ideas about how a photographic image should look. Artists too have argued - in favour and against of this new art form.

However in the past, many painters from Degas to Andy Warhol have made use of photography in their works. Apart from incorporating photographic images in their paintings, several artists, such as David Hockney, have also used the camera as eloquently as they have used other standard tools for creating their visual expressions.

Some people involved with photography have at times used the term ‘Pure Photography’. But it is very difficult to define this term in a way that can be acceptable to all. The only examples of pure photograph that I can think of are the snapshots made by children and laypersons with ‘point and shoot’ type digital cameras. On the other hand, right from its beginning, photographers - professionals as well as amateurs- have rarely made photographs without manipulations. Manipulation made before clicking a camera by selecting the lens, changed perspective. Aperture and shutter speed were often set for controlling the sharpness. Filters were used for altering colours and tonality. Several methods involving chemicals, temperature and time were employed in the dark room during processing negative films and also while enlarging prints to get the desired contrast.  Some times the negatives and final prints were also retouched, even hand coloured. Two or more negatives were used in combination and parts of photographs were also collaged to create a new image. Doing this was a kind of a guessing game. It required much experience and skill because the results achieved by most of such stages were not visible at the time they were employed. However, now there are several new and more efficient tools available; a digital camera, computer and software such as the Photoshop. They allow, encourage or even tempt a photographer to utilize these tools to assign the desired look and form to his photographic images. The plus point of this method is that each stage can be controlled separately in bright light, and its result can be seen, altered and mixed.

One of the inclinations found among artists or an important attribute of their works is not to hide the media they used. This must be the reason why stone is so evident in Henry Moore’s sculptures and surfaces of oil paints are so obvious in Van Gogh’s paintings. Why a work of Andy Warhol is   simultaneously a painting, serigraph and photograph? As a printmaker interested in photography I had a dream of printing my photographic images by Photogravure, the intaglio process used by master photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and his colleagues during the early decades of last century. Though I could not manage to do that, now I can at least ‘edit’ my photographs on a computer and print them with pigment based inks on papers made from 100% cotton fibers. This process has made it possible for me to achieve the end results quite similar to the Photogravure prints. It also allows me to alter the colour balance and tonality of the images to make them appear a bit more pleasing without changing their initial meanings and contexts. However while enjoying doing these I have focused on making two kinds of images. Answers of the questions like what, when, where, and who may be found in an image. In the other, though the images are photographic ones, such questions are irrelevant and, I expect that instead of providing information to viewers they would invoke emotional response.