Meditations of another kind
On Nitin’s ‘Hands of a bonnet macaque’
Image of the month-May 2012
at CNP
It is said that ability to grasp objects with hand was one of the key factors to evolution of Homo-Sapiens. It was hands which sculpted rudimentary tools from stones & wood to hunt, protect, build and till. Hands and mind worked in tandem, honed capabilities of each other. Hands could accomplish what brain thought necessary. The ability to accomplish provided a nourishing feedback to brain. Ends of survival were achieved through the collective labour of mind and body. Hand evolved and went on to mean a lot of things; work, unity, friendship, handshake, crush, caress, bless, thwart, reassure, cradle.
Bonhomie between face (read mind) and limbs covered a lot of ground. Slowly they began to part company. In a discourse driven society the anthem of mind over matter placed the face on a throne to which rest of the body parts became subservient. Ever increasingly it was seen as the seat of consciousness. Ascendency of face was established. Arts and commerce refined this schism to the level of fetish. Face became the person.
In portraiture face has become so dominant that the rest of the body could at best be seen as a prop to hold the almighty face. Production of head and face centric art and photographic images robbed the viewers of their capacity to look at the body as a whole. Sadly that was to miss out on the tales told by the rest of the body.
It is in the backdrop of such conditioning that Nitin’s DSC_2658.jpg- hands of a bonnet macaque assumes importance. In one split second decision he severs the head from the whole to concentrate on the hands.
“The framing is the strongest attribute of this picture. If the photographers’ frame surrounded two figures isolating them from the crowd where they stood it created a relationship between the two that had not existed before. The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating forces a concentration on the picture edge, the line that separates in from out and on the shapes that are created by it” John Szarkowski. (The photographer’s eye.)
In the picture “hands of a bonnet macaque” hands wouldn’t have become the central element if the picture had included the face. Inclusion of face would’ve immediately brought to fore the way we are trained to see. That would’ve denied attention to the hands. Now hands is all we see.
When the picture was posted some of us agreed that it was two pictures in one; one on top of the other. Personally, I saw a visual split right in the middle of the frame. One picture started from the top of the frame, top hand included, ending somewhere in the middle. Where the first one ended, the second began ending at the bottom of the frame. Revisiting the picture during the course of writing I find myself reading it differently. The split is not there. Instead it draws me in through the way the hands are poised. One hand, the lower one faces away and the other, the top one faces towards the viewer. Together they tell two sides of a story. The lower hand is densely hirsute. Each strand of hair is sharply defined. There’s no sign of bare skin. We are looking at an animal. The gaze when moves up pauses briefly at the breasts before resting on the top hand. In an instant the shape of the finger and nails catch attention. Slender shape of the small finger looks human in biological sense. Hair have receeded. Skin is visible. Nails look like nails not claws. Between a few centimeters of space between the hands lies the time, the evolutionary time in which the tremendous, excruciating story of a Homo-Sapien unfolds. Shedding one hair must’ve taken millennia. A statement has been made by this picture.
There are similar pictures on CNP which attempt to locate stories through non-face centric portraiture of natural world.
At another level such portraiture strikes down the established hierarchy of seeing which is strongly hegemonised by the face. It is courageous to ignore the established canons, and, by implication the cult of personality which is based on reading of the face. The ramifications of such seeing would go beyond the purely aesthetical, into the political.
Aesop made this point in 600 BC in one of his fables “The stag at the pool” http://www.aesops-fables.org.uk/the-sta ... e-pool.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Through the fable he constructed the idea of the beauty of functionality. In a world in which hands and their labour have become marginalized Nitin’s picture does an encore of Aesop’s fable.
By excluding the vain it celebrates the beauty of functionality.
Nirlep Singh