Cropping the City: Lessons from Sassoon Docks
One of Gopal’s most thought-provoking pieces of feedback to me at last Sunday’s photo-walk at Sassoon Docks was to crop. I had been experiencing that thing that is not quite FOMO. It’s having learnt that I can’t rely on my body or mind so rushing to cram as much as I can into one breath, one moment, one click. Yet, that just means losing everything. I wanted to try his advice on a pic to see if I could isolate the stories better.
Here’s one that I played around on Canva with. It’s at the very edge of the dock and before entering the jetty where the fish is unloaded.
The ladies squatting over their baskets smelt my feelings before I did. One of them warned me to take care of my valuables because ‘wahan pe chori hota hain’. They also cast a disdainful glance at the man who had insisted on a picture with me and was attempting to direct me into the crowd at the jetty.
Pickpockets had not occurred to me. Me of the interepid train travels, so proud of never losing a thing and being a ‘real Mumbaiker’. I was an intruder here. I was committing that cardinal sin in Mumbai of getting in the way of someone at work. There is no greater sin especially at the epicenter of Mumbadevi’s blessings – the gifts of the sea.
I backed away and didn’t go up to the jetty, after all. I hadn’t realised the anxiety creep in. This was my only view of where fish meets land at Sassoon Docks.
Here is the other part of the same photograph. Gopal’s eyes were drawn to the market activity and he suggested a tighter crop. But I don’t think I actually do so well with portraits or people. My favorite shots from all that I took are not of living people but buildings, trees, objects, animals and paintings.
I pointed to the sunrise in the corner and said,
“But, isn’t that lovely?”
He said, yes if you want to focus on that. And he pointed to the birds on the wire and how the angle they form framed the change of colours in the sky.
Sometimes you need someone else to shape the stories that already show up in your head. So this is my sunrise over Sasson shot.
I think I find people, their faces and bodies too intense to experience for long. I find myself slip-sliding into their lives and what brought them here. Is the red saree woman who is bending over on her period and is that why she chose that colour? Does she ache? My back throbbed immediately. The second man on the left, holding up a cloth to his nose. Does he have a cold? He must be used to this smell so it can’t be that which is bothering him. How did he survive COVID? Flashback of my two years of misery, pristine comfort compared what I invent of his life. The guy in yellow, is he going to protest being in my shot? His face isn’t that visible so perhaps it will be okay. Or is he noticing that I’m wearing the same colour as he is? The boy in blue looking down at whatever the woman is lifting – is he learning, is he judging, is he dissociating?
But the sunrise is free. As are the birds.
Fly, little life. You have wings. I only have a mind.