2011
I do not wish my camera to put into form what an ideal India would be, a strange
and beautiful India too beautiful to be true. The unbelievable is to be captured
elsewhere, in the everyday, the ordinary, the commonplace… In the streets.
IItake pictures from taxis, autos, trains and buses. I need to add speed to my frame
if I want my photos to dazzle and sizzle. And I walk a lot, for long stretches of time.
The body knows when it needs to dance instead of marching like he who knows what
he is doing and where he is heading.
I trace routes in red pencil on the map so that the urban landscape becomes a scenery
filled with actors and props persons, stand-ins and stagehands in an endless comedy
with no director in sight. The Indians have invented fluidity in chaos and vice versa.
In that flux I merge and take the pulse of the two mega-cities. Urban landscapes, human
or animal figures, crowds or singled out individuals, alternating close-ups and long
distance views, the unique and the multiple : I purport to document the topologies and
populations of the two cities in a kind of unending tracking shot.
In India, everything is intertwined, different times, graphic signs that mix religion and
advertising, everything is grander than life, in proportions that make everything constantly
interact and then dissolve almost immediately.
I don’t now why, my vision is lateral and panoramic in Mumbai. While in Delhi it goes
into greater depths, in a more one to one relationship. Tracking shot and reverse angle ?
I am dazzled by the Indian art of straddling and spanning eras. The present, today seems
absorbable, almost as if it were already a thing of the past.
One needs to document these dissonances. That is precisely what I am doing.
Laurent Ouisse
Translated By Bernard Turle
I do not wish my camera to put into form what an ideal India would be, a strange
and beautiful India too beautiful to be true. The unbelievable is to be captured
elsewhere, in the everyday, the ordinary, the commonplace… In the streets.
IItake pictures from taxis, autos, trains and buses. I need to add speed to my frame
if I want my photos to dazzle and sizzle. And I walk a lot, for long stretches of time.
The body knows when it needs to dance instead of marching like he who knows what
he is doing and where he is heading.
I trace routes in red pencil on the map so that the urban landscape becomes a scenery
filled with actors and props persons, stand-ins and stagehands in an endless comedy
with no director in sight. The Indians have invented fluidity in chaos and vice versa.
In that flux I merge and take the pulse of the two mega-cities. Urban landscapes, human
or animal figures, crowds or singled out individuals, alternating close-ups and long
distance views, the unique and the multiple : I purport to document the topologies and
populations of the two cities in a kind of unending tracking shot.
In India, everything is intertwined, different times, graphic signs that mix religion and
advertising, everything is grander than life, in proportions that make everything constantly
interact and then dissolve almost immediately.
I don’t now why, my vision is lateral and panoramic in Mumbai. While in Delhi it goes
into greater depths, in a more one to one relationship. Tracking shot and reverse angle ?
I am dazzled by the Indian art of straddling and spanning eras. The present, today seems
absorbable, almost as if it were already a thing of the past.
One needs to document these dissonances. That is precisely what I am doing.
Laurent Ouisse
Translated By Bernard Turle
