© David de Souza 2019
The granite of a makers obsession cannot be taught, it can only be expressed and hopefully inspired in the ones paying attention. Freedom to create is just as liberating a reward for the inspired and tenacious. Maker, photographer and teacher David De Souza talks Photosophy in an interview with Sonalee Tomar.
Tell us about your journey.
I started out at a time in India when boys did Science, girls did Arts and Gujaratis did commerce. Not being female or Gujarati, I rolled over from my bed a few times and discovered one day that I had a ‘Masters in Biochemistry’. I exercised little choice, but on registering for a PhD, I had pangs of doubt, did I really want a life in academia? Was I born for greater things – the motto of my school in Bandra, Bombay. My mum who was avant-garde and more encouraging of experimentation was the one I confided in, I wanted out, Dad would be disappointed as all hell, but I wanted to volunteer for a year to work for an organisation called Maharashtra Prabhodhan Seva Mandal, a water resources and agricultural development organisation that worked with Adivasis in Surganna Taluka, Nasik.
I lived in a 10’x 5’ Karvi and cow dung hut with no electricity and running water but it was a watershed in my life of thought, time, love, action and contemplation. A time to examine Time and its relentless vector or whether it was cyclical and Karmic, it was transcendental in terms of questioning who am i, where did I come from and where was I going. It was a time in my life where I got a stipend of Rs 300/month but books were just affordable, Aubrey Menon, Nietzsche, Koestler, Gide, Camus, Teilhard de Chardin, became the hammers that struck twilights in my many myths and idols.
And yes I fell in love too.
The biggest lesson I leant was that I had very little to teach, and that Time like calculus tended to Infinity.
Cut to many years later after being a professional photographer, I was invited to teach a semester in a Mass Media course, damn!
I discovered Youtube could teach aperture, shutter and all that camera arithmetic and physics far more eloquently than I ever could, so figured reversing the telescope to be the microscope, what if I were a student, what would give me the foundation for great photography? So I dragged out Ivan Illichs De-schooling of Society, who along with Avedon, Joel Peter Witkin, Lachapelle, and the Mahabharata I thought would encourage us to question our worlds, to look at things sideways, to imagine the dark side of the moon. I called it Photosophy.
© David de Souza 2019
How did your tryst with the camera begin?
I bought a second hand Minolta SRT101 from a lady who wanted Rs 3000/-, while my life savings totalled Rs 1800/- After a year (literally) of haggling, she, basically to shut down my importunity, said with disdain, “if you come up with Rs 2000, you can have the camera”, it’s the first and only time in my life I borrowed money from Dad.
The camera was a talisman, it had an ambition for me, I was hapless. I met a wonderful man, Babla Senapati, who became friend, philosopher and guide. He seemed to think I had some smattering of talent and promoted me. I can’t stress how important it was to have a ‘mentor’, though when students refer to me as one, I shrug it off and tell them I’d rather be a ‘tormentor’.
What inspires you?
My wife and I when we sit in traffic, perforce often have meaningful conversations. The joys of crappy urban infrastructure. She asked me once – what motivates you? I did not need a second. “Beauty”, inspires me, makes me want to get up in the morning and get going. It fills me with delight, joy and wonder. Beauty comes at you from anywhere and when you least expect it. I waxed on. Then I thought, damn I should reciprocate and ask her what motivates her, she did not have to think either, “relationships” she said. I thought, what a fine answer and then not wanting to be ousted, timidly responded, there is beauty in relationships.
Women inspire me abundantly, I seem not to tire from all explorations. The generosity of women who want to be co-collaborators baffle me, the trust they imbue in me wants me to be trustworthy.
© David de Souza 2019
Take us through your process.
The process varies depending on what is currently on the anvil. For example, I did a largish project some years ago on Dreams in collaboration with Charmayne (the wife) who is a dream analyst. After having worked in advertising I was sick to my back teeth with bright, shiny, happy dreams, I was more interested in dark, cryptic, mysterious, bipolar, and/or erotic dreams. My subjects mostly women, Charmayne and I would take their actual dreams, and figure out what mythology, semiotics, and visual analogies to conscript to make a dramatic, visually exciting photograph. The background, foreground and above all ‘expression’ would be detailed. Having said that at the appointed time, all of that could be tossed out the studio window and something spontaneous, could be used instead if it still would communicate. Simplicity is key, though I am not opposed to Rococo. I’ve been called a Maximalist, I relish it.
Who are your maestros?
Theatre, music, dance, the performing arts turn me on. Though I have never hitherto been a Sebastio Selgado fan, on seeing his original prints of an enormous show, Genesis, I was speechless at the energy, commitment, integrity, width, depth and skill this man has.
Another show that came to the Piramal gallery in bombay many years ago by a little known photographer Arthur Tress, I remember clearly, being mesmerised.
I met David Lachapelle, have been a big admirer of his use of colour and taking pot shots at American pop culture.
I saw Pilobolus in Bombay, I could not believe that human beings could have that kind of trajectory, balance, gravity defying bodies, perfection in motion. I could dedicate my life to photographing them if I had the chance.
There are just too many ‘Maestros’, but Joel Peter Witkin, Jan Saudek, Roger Ballen take on what the world would normally reject and they force you to see beauty in death, the margins and ugliness itself.
What are the biggest challenges in your work? What has been your biggest learning experience?
The biggest thing for me is to stay fresh and relevant to myself, I give a fig as to what publishers, gallerists, the establishment, custodians of the artistic think about any of this. Freedom is the basis of creativity, fear is just its obverse.
What trends have you observed in the world?
That most/all our artists crave the endorsement of the west, we’ve become mind readers and mirror the aesthetic that the west know, love and understand. For example if you are vernacular in Telugu and English is an alien language, your painting will have English words on it rather than Telugu, it’s a sort of pandering which in my opinion diminishes rather than enhances. The marketing tail wagging the artist dog. If you are a photo-journalist in India particularly, you will make photos in black and white, because colour in India which has meaning and syntax which needs a native, indigenous and ethnic understating of why it works is ‘vulgar’ to the western sensibility.
© David de Souza 2019
How do you foresee photography evolving?
I think we are just at the beginning of photography with the digital spectrum of imagination that can blow our minds. I see the visual crossing synapses with audio. I see
3D printing opening all kinds of new ways of seeing.
How do you balance life and art?
I can’t see any ‘balance’, I don’t think I can put on ‘photographer’ , gardener, fabricator, relaxer, biker, hats, one effortlessly flows into the other like iodised salt, most days when its sunny I shoot, or else I potter in the garden, tinker, sleep or meet friends, its all part of the same.
What is one imperative piece of advice you would give a young photographer who is just starting out?
Look at everything, buy books by photographers to know what not to copy. Be true to yourself even if you don’t find any body enthusiastic about your work. However that can engender complacency, mediocrity and isolation. Show your work to people who you think will give you feed back not based on meanness. Be big enough to take criticism even when it hurts badly. Go back to the cave within your heart and search for yourself. The pearl of great price resides there.
What’s coming next?
Exciting stuff. A large project on underwater photography, Hieromymous Bosch, the Goan Landscape.
What is the primary role of a photographer?
I don’t know about that, it sounds photosophical. I know that my role is to have fun, a lightness of being, be authentic, honest, true to myself. It’s kind of selfish in some ways. Many photographers want to be ‘activists’, I tend to run in the opposite direction from the didactic, pedantic and the moralists.
© David de Souza 2019
Tell us about your current projects.
I would like to call this series Amniotic Universes. But who knows the title might suggest itself as it moves along.
Dada and Surrealism have been my most inspirational art movements, I’ve wanted to create an earthly grounded environment, underwater. We emerged from the waters we are told much like salamanders; our cells are isotonic with the ocean. There is an umbilical cord that tugs at us. It is also a universe where gravity releases its stranglehold much like Space. These worlds within worlds are enticing. It’s a world that is familiar and uninhabitable simultaneously. We need to take our air from outside, inside. Just the idea of drinking tea, watching TV, brushing ones teeth, going to bed, bathing, doing mundane activity underwater, suddenly becomes surreal and creative.
© David de Souza 2019
How did the project come about? Tell us about the process and hiccups.
I’ve been a BSAC diver and have dived in the Red Sea. Back in analog days, you could shoot just 36 frames before surfacing to reload or take multiple camera bodies with you, either way, I figured I would never be a David Doubliet (a fantastic Underwater photographer), just the arithmetic and physiology of diving/shooting/creating was stacked against me, I then felt the need to shoot in a controlled environment. I needed an underwater studio. Most of the photography I do these days is very different from how I began, which was in the streets, shooting photo essays, of what existed. These days I begin pretty much with a white, grey or black canvass much like a painter and then drop subjects into the frame, either montage or actually through elaborate diligence.
Creating an underwater studio was the first objective, how to get the water to be crystal clear, ozone or chlorine, can’t have a blue pool, the colour contamination of blue on skin would be too problematic to clean in ‘post’, making ports to introduce lights so one can shoot in the dark etc were the physical, architectural challenges.
Subsequently one realizes that fabric and in deed all materials behave very differently underwater, I’ve invested in lead weights that fishermen use for their nets. You can’t take a balloon underwater; you have to re-learn school density and physics.
For my subjects who can’t use swimming goggles, how do they respond basically ‘blind’? How to keep vinyl backgrounds from undulating when a swimmer powers past.
Most critically how to fire my strobes that are above the water from below, water is opaque to radio waves and infra red, so conventional triggers used on land can’t work, I’ve DIYed an electronic device that floats on the surface that radio fires my strobes. And then there are days when just about everything goes wrong, an error underwater can be a very expensive affair.
I first had to master the controls of the camera in an enormous ‘housing’, so that it would all be seamless and professional when actually shooting. Subjects can be Channel crossing, state level swimmers, but that does not translate automatically to good underwater swimming, it’s a different technique, you can only ‘exhale’ and then not panic.
However when it does come together it’s sheer magic. Often times the water is so crystal that most people who see the photographs don’t believe they were shot underwater. I’m ok with that too, but I do try and make sure there are bubbles or other indications of an altered universe.
© David de Souza 2019
How does your audience interact and react to the unexpected?
My wife refers to me as the most famous unknown photographer, I find the description charming. So for the most part, I have no or a very small audience. I used to have 3.5 admirers of my work and when my dear friend passed away 3 years ago, the number came down to 2.5. I have had photo curators, local and international walk into our home studio in Mumbai which was lined from the ceiling to the floor with my work, spend less than 4 minutes totally and leave without a word. It would have been frustrating if I were younger and in a hurry or financially desperate.
However children or the unschooled find what I do fascinating. I receive that as high praise.
Interestingly I find Goa more receptive, the kinds of people that travel through Goa are anti-establishment to some extent, and my work is better suited here.
However I must narrate a story of some years ago, commercial photographers in Mumbai exhibited their personal, non-commercial work, in an exhibition called Exhibit A. One day I came to the exhibition hall and saw the armoured vehicles and official entourage of a Shiv Sena leader. My heart went down to my boots; the only photographs that could be seen as ‘controversial’ were mine. I was on tenterhooks, do I enter, do I flee? I thought about it in a cold sweat and decided I was not going to live in fear. On entering I saw the politician being shown around by the photographer organizer, they all stopped at my panel, spent some time and moved on, I was sitting in some shadow observing this from the corner of my eye, they left without event. I finally breathed. Some time after, a few just regular ‘walk-in’ people came by and when they discovered that it was I who made those photos, came up to me, to congratulate me on showing new ways of seeing their familiar mythological characters. I felt they truly understood what I was trying to say, no captions, and no wall text. My heart soared.
How is this going to evolve? Is there a future avatar in the pipeline?
Yes, I am dying to get into 3D infra red mapping, unrehearsed live dance and music performances that will be like a raga or jazz completely different each time depending on venue and location. There are some technological expenses; hardware and software to master first, the dancer, musician and visuals are more or less in place. I love to dance so whatever I do has to involve dancers in some shape and form.
How do you describe yourself in the context of challenging people’s perspectives via your work and art?
I don’t make photos for anyone other than myself. I am not here to challenge anyone’s perceptions or belief systems. If that happens, thank you very much, it’s all bonus. I do not start out to ‘make art’, I do not consider myself an artist either, if you or anyone thinks that what I do is art, I will take it as blessing. It’s up to you, not me to call myself an artist. I used to think that creativity was like the Greek symbol of infinity, a Mobius strip, one aspect you did privately and derived joy from, the other was once you launched it into the public arena where it lived of its own atman and energy beyond the author. I’ve come to feel that it’s ok if the work lives and dies with me and not one other soul sees it. It’s like a riyaz, a meditation, part of the collective unconscious, I make no effort to publicize my work. I am at peace with this.
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