The Feels This Week: Going Fishing
I went on my first photo walk! It was probably because I mistook it for a city walk, of which I’ve had several. And it was by the GoHalluHallu folks who led me on the Worli-Koliwada walk in December 2019 before the world went to hell. It was also my first time in a fish market. Consider that for someone who grew up in one of the oldest fishing villages on an island!
I’ve realised that I don’t enjoy the crowded mayhem of music events. I am actively repelled by the money-grubbing, glitzy filth of film. Literature and poetry events are where I find my home. But these tend to settle into complacent silos of class and airconditioned stagnation. I have felt alone in my conversations with the city – how I am impacted by it and how I actively seek it out just as I seek out fresh breaths in this island that will otherwise drown me. I have learnt that street photographers stand in that sweet spot.
There is so much I’m yet to process from today. And that didn’t stop me from writing my first Instagram post in over 72 weeks. And here it is.
(@ideasmithy)~O~O~O~O~O~O~
For a life-long island dweller, today was my first visit to an actual fish market. I spent the morning at Sassoon Docks with @chhavibombay, curated by @bombay_ka_shana and @mumbaipaused. They did warn us that it would be overwhelming. They didn’t mean the smell of fish; I got used to that pretty quicky, much to my surprise. “Next time, don’t wear such bright colours,” they said and they were right. A street photographer needs the ability to dissolve into the crowd. It’s a quality I miss about being the anonymous IdeaSmith looking out at this city with an everyperson eye without being identifiable as any one. My blog was originally called ‘A faceless voice. A voiceless face. Just another statistic.”
Standing for something means standing out. It also traps you into ivory towers of class self-consciousness and the stories that I think I am supposed to tell. Aslam suggested picking a theme and Gopal added that we’d notice patterns in our work. I didn’t listen; I was in a hurry to get to the actual doing. My collection is a 100-odd jumble of bizarre angles. Gopal said I was over-zealous with the zoom. I was greedy; I wanted to grab everything in one frame so I contorted the view to cram as much as I could.
There were the moments that I didn’t dwell on because I know them so well. I have told these stories (even if only to myself) so many times, I know instinctively how to frame them. Those are the pictures that appear in this post. They may make it to my future blogposts, as I choose words over pictures. Maybe I could have lived those moments more richly than just snapping them for future stories.
The fish smell has been washed off me. But I think this trip will stay with me for a long time to come.
I love these shots you took so much, and I think one of the reasons why is because a lot of them try to show a connect between the larger view and the people who normally go unnoticed in it. Like the man setting (what I think is) a cot in front of the wall art of a crow or the markers for the toilets (“man” for men and…”urinal” for women, as you had pointed out once). You do have an artistic eye and I feel like that may go hand in hand with the way you may view landscapes and take photographs as you go.
@LizzyBeth: I do hope so. Gopal’s comments on my pictures were that I have the stories, I just need to use technique better to frame them.
The images look lovely on the blog. The mobile screen was too small.
@Gopal: Thank you so much and for visiting my blog again too! It’s a lovely throwback to the days when we first became friends across cities via blogposts and comments.