Meditations of another kind
on
“All eyes” by Raviprakash S S
(Image of the month at CNP for June 2012)
Space exists as a gapingly vacuous void, ever so forlorn without a seed, ferment or fervor.
Who walks there?
Who beholds that penurious infinity, a whole lot of cosmos where nothing stirs?
Then…
There is this rustle. A blade of grass, a snake passing through; green in green. There is a see’er (read seer) whose eye focuses on this indecipherable materiality called life. Focus materializes sleepy dimensions. It makes empty space come alive. The flourish of focus in space is like a child in the womb; the most exquisite manifestation of co-dependence of the temporal and the spatial. The act of focussing transforms the spatial into mental by identifying solids with breathing and moving life.
So arrives a snake in Raviprakash’s garden (or eden?). I would prefer to call it eden because of the trust between the the photographer who is a visitor to his native place, and the snake-the resident native. The intimacy allows him to come as close as an earshot of the snake. I recall my birder friend Sujan Chatterjee narrating how to tell whether a place is perceived as safe by birds. “It is very safe for them if we are allowed to approach them within an earshot, not very safe if we are allowed no closer than a slingshot distance and seen as unsafe if they stay a gunshot distance away.” Thus it emerges from “All eyes” and his earlier images of vine snakes taken at his native place that neither the photographer nor the snake are suspicious of each other’s presence.
In words of Raviprakash “Green vine snake is very attractive subject for me.. we have grown up seeing those friendly snakes in our neighbourhood. Though its a snake it really doesn’t scare us much ” And “CNP influence made me to look for different angles/compositions and hence i went behind the snake to see any opportunity. Popping eyes were just too good and i captured the snake with only eye in focus. I was capturing from about 15-18 inches from the eyes.. so even f/8 was giving DOF just to keep eyes in focus. The curvy snake added its own drama. I was extremely happy with the result. Since the snake was just about 6-8 feets from our house, i coud track its movements till noon..i ended up clicking mostly this snake in first half of the day. It gave me many opportunities with different angles (including top view).”
Ravi has been able to click from many possible perspectives; the present one being unique where a vine snake leaps into the frame looking as a vine with its head like a flower bud. The snake is presented as a dimorph switching appearance between a plant and snake. The most interesting part is that it avoids all stereotypes of a snake image. It has no venomous intent. Nor does it arouse any feeling of “proverbial desire” due to which snake, adam and eve have been reviled since the dawn of civilization. Instead it looks to be a friendly and genteel creature busy looking into its eden throwing back his eye once in a while, watching its own back.
For the snake it is a very liberating image because it does not echo any of our received knowledge about snakes. Far from making it look fatally fearful it brings to us an intimate creature. It often happens through cultural practices that things no longer remain things as they are. They acquire cultural meanings and often in our dealing with them the acquired meaning gets fore-grounded. The actual subject stays hidden behind the mist of meanings. It requires a trusting habitat as this in order to clear the mist and know the true being of the other.
I have a professor friend Dr Subhash Parihar. His photographs are visually very compelling. There is a quality of inexplicability about them. Parihar never gives titles to his pictures. When asked about the reason he calmly says “ I click visuals not meanings. A visual with obvious meaning is like a caged bird.”
“All eyes” in spite of having a title preserves sanctity of the visual. It clicks a snake and sets it free.
Adam, Eve and the proverbial reptile can safely book their return passage to Eden.
Nirlep Singh