Soliloquists (2011)
soliloquy |səˈliləkwē|
noun ( pl. -quies)
an act of speaking one’s thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers, esp. by a character in a play.
The genesis of this series lies with my exposure, as an eight year old, to the image of an 18th cent. etching by Thomas Daniell. The subject in question is an aquatint depicting ruins of Gour, the ancient capital of Bengal, India. The scene delineates a dilapidated structure in midst of overgrowth. The inanimate background is juxtaposed against an antithetic foreground depicting tall grass, swaying in wind, perhaps, and a sinister wild pig visible in it. The background shows hints of two static human figures.
This image has strong overtures of solitude, almost melancholia about it. And as a
child, I remember being mesmerized by it (I still do) not because of its intrinsic imagery, but rather, by its ability to initiate an unspoken and possibly an unintended narrative through a surprisingly inert & a frozen composition.
Soliloquists is a series that probes this aspect in photography. Inherently, photography strives to capture & freeze subjects in a frame, often swaddling them into an infinite hibernation. This series strives to map such salient, immanent narratives of seemingly insentient subjects only to inscribe them into a flat, uni-dimensional space to document their soliloquy.