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Vipin Baliga's "Life is beautiful"
Image of the month at CNP for Feb 2012
- Life is beautiful, by Vipin Baliga
- life is beautiful.jpg (85.88 KiB) Viewed 7490 times
“What you see in the picture are the green lacewing eggs…Photographed after around 25 hrs since the eggs were laid…If you look carefully you can see the semi developed lacewing midge inside each egg…They are all in the typical fetus position…You can also see the tiny dark spot inside, which is the eye..!!” Vipin Baliga
A vocalist takes alap and plays with syllable-less sound before moving into raga’ proper. “Life is beautiful” is a visual analog of alap; slow, steady, stringed with hope. Things are in a state of patient arrival. There is no haste. Deepest truths are often understood through silence. Vipin while presenting the shot hallmarked it with understatement. He kept away everything from the final image which could grab undue attention of the viewer. The contrast, color, tones, sharpness all attention seeking markers were doused with/through adept judgment of the scene. In his own words “I chose b/w to keep the frame as simple and minimal as possible and also not to add a color element into the frame which I thought would grab the attention of any viewer away from the curved silk strands.I was photographing the eggs with no intention of thinking about anything creative. Documenting the miracle of life is all that I had in my mind then. I was waiting for the eggs to hatch, uncertain how many days it would take, or if at all they would ever hatch”
I’ll admit that initially the color version appealed to me as the right candidate for post because translucent pink on egg shells was characteristic of life and birth. I later realized that the color version belonged more to the domain of scientific/clinical enquiry. The act of doing away with color reduces its visual load. It also moves it from the realm of the particular to the symbolic. Doing away with color has made the image emblematic of the process.
- Life is beautiful- color version
- IMG_6468-cnp-color800.JPG (64.69 KiB) Viewed 7490 times
There is something profound going on here. We are looking at the genesis; a phenomenon perfected over millennia of evolution. The image of a phenomenon as this must be free of pretentions or amplification simply because of the intrinsic faith it has in itself.
The next notable attribute of the picture is its lightness in terms of forms and their interconnectedness. Some capillaries are bent more than the others. It could be due photographer’s breath. The eggs and the silken capillaries are both rounded. There is a sense of completeness about a round shape which is not contingent. It is complete in itself. It exudes peace. In going round itself it doesn’t show spatial preference. Eggs resting on capillaries appear to be weightless, in balance. There is no tension neither a possibility of collapse; such is the lightness with which the egg attaches itself to the capillary. Just look at the point of junction where capillary attaches to the egg. A tiny halo marks each attachment. I reckon it plays the same part as sepal in a flower; of protecting the flower before it opens. A slight pre-occupation with photo-shop could’ve marred the tenuousness of linkages.
There’s an aroma in the shot which comes from the forms resembling tulip buds. It’s remarkable how the circular shape is the most preferred shape of life forms. Indian ethos has a special place for a circle. “Bhugol” for earth, “Khagol” for space, Hiranyagarabha the womb of light as the primordial womb from where our universe springs and folds back into. Miraculously a few millimeters of unseen space on a 8.5 feet high wall carries echoes of the macrocosm.
I’m sure the alap moved into Raga and Vipin heard it for all of us.
Nirlep Singh
