A Walkable Distance
“Hourglass. Calcutta is an hourglass and each person a grain of sand. Each day, we all pour through the opening. Every morning, each of us begins to slide downwards. By night all of us have squeezed through to pile up below, in extremely close proximity to everyone else, waiting for the morning to nudge us again and send us on our way.”
The subject of this description by Ruchir Joshi (as published in Granta) – Calcutta – lies at the heart of my and Siddhartha Hajra’s joint zine project. Though life has mostly pulled us in different directions, and sometimes even to different continents, what connects us is in this project is a shared photographic journey that is as old as our friendship of 16 years. Meeting annually, as we still do in Calcutta, our photo collaboration has stood witness to the way time has passed along various axes of personhood, as well as along those of urbanity in the very city where we first met and developed our own visual language.
This photographic archive built over the course of our combined 32 years of working is seeded in the soil of this landscape and its uniquely pulsating rhythms – rhythms that we believe only unravel themselves to those who walk the distance. We employ this emphasis on walking as a device to demystify the ways in which a South Asian metropolis can be understood in registers outside of those in the Global North. Borrowing from Rebecca Solnit, we insist that “the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, suggesting that the mind is also a landscape and that walking a way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.”
Thus, through a compendium of our images we aim to ask – what happens when you visit and revisit the same street corner, or pass the same Cinema hall? Do the tunes of their tales imbue themselves into you, do the vestiges of their existences leave a mark? And where might this mark be located? In what note might their symphony be played? Is it a whisper or a bang? Can the fork in the road, the very familiar you had sought to find, present itself to you anew? Does it surprise you? Does it stop you short of breath? It is this breath, this pulse, of the place that they hope to capture.
In doing so, we paint not only an intimate portrait of a friendship that has evolved over time, but also of the city that has evolved with it – ultimately asking how do repetition and return function in the making of images? How does the familiar carry the weight of all its associations and connotations whilst remaining free and ready to transform and recreate meaning?
This is our walkable distance.
