“Vulture- A portrait” was posted by Ganesh Shankar on 1st may 2011, almost three months back. Ever since this shot was posted it disturbed me with its ambiguity. I was not able to place what was there about the shot which is so arresting. It was not just the lighting neither was the presence of detail and sharpness. One would broadly ascribe a mood to it but what mood? Why does it probe? I could find an echo in John berger’s lines "Yet it can happen, suddenly, unexpectedly, and most frequently in half light of glimpses, that we catch sight of another order which intersects with ours and has nothing to do with it………………..suddenly and disconcertingly we see between two frames. We come upon a part of the visible which wasn’t destined for us. Perhaps it was destined for night-birds, reindeer, ferrets, eels, whales……"
John Berger, from “Opening a gate” in Why look at animals.
The drama begins with conversion into black and white. It mystifies the dark from which the vulture appears to emerge and places the image in the category of the un-familiar. Enough to hook on to the image the eye now travels across and over the body of the vulture. Everything is silent there. The feathers are in place, the gait is good and perch solid. And then comes the eye and the eye rests there. At once one perceives a distance between oneself and the bird. What is this distance? Why this distance when the camera has brought the bird so close? It’s here that JB’s lines begin to matter. Yes, we are looking at a different order. A bird of prey, rapacious, ruthless and powerful, this is what comes to mind while thinking about a vulture. These traits are contingent not endemic, coming to fore only to fulfill existential requirements of a vulture. There exists a vulture which when not answering calls for survival is a vulture abstracted as a bird without any of its peculiarities or traits which make it into a beast. Ganesh has captured the eagle at such a moment when it is, if I may say so, changing its robe. At this juncture, when the photographer is about to drop the shutter the bird looks back. It is watching its back but it looks as if it is “looking back” from a different time. The silence of the frame is suffused with sense of departure. The vulture has departed. The bird remains.
Something about finding such moments; life goes on, things move, things depart. Not all of that registers with us except for moments which are existentially relevant. It’s like keeping the shutter open for a long exposure of a motion scene. Everything becomes a fuzz of activity without precipitates of life and meaning. But a photographer becomes an extended eye searching for life in between the interstices of time. This dark gem belongs there.
Nirlep Singh
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