Why is the exhibition named ‘Spectres’?
I’m someone who can’t think of titles. ‘Reflections’ was one of the things that I thought of, but then Girish Shahane (art critic and curator) suggested ‘Spectres’. It meant so much more and captured the sense of at least some of the works. He came up with the name for the essay in the catalogue, as well as the exhibition, particularly when he saw these two works (Erase and In a Room). There’s something spectral about them, some presences in them that are not quite concrete.
Are the portraits featured in this show all based on real people?
Half of them have come from the photographs that I take around the streets. They’re not photos of people, they’re street photos, but then I look at every detail of the people captured in those photos. I may not notice them when I’m actually photographing them, but when I’m searching for something that speaks to me in the final photograph, I find them. The remaining half of the photographs are imagined. A couple of them are from found photos, such as the press photos which showed a Kashmiri youth with pellet wounds, and an image of Sai Baba which comes from an old photo we have.
