By Venkat Srinivasan

14 March 2007

Mallikarjun Mansur is dead. Sure, he was an influential classical vocalist and a personality whose music and voice would continue to live beyond even our time. But stare as you might forever at his photograph, he did pass away in 1992 and that's just how it is. And what's with the leaf anyway?

***

Reality can be annoying: there is a decaying leaf near my foot, still and rather calm. Probably a little cold under the enlarging carpet of rain clouds above me. It stirs a little, shivering and alone, but decayed it is. Perched on the parapet, I look away, and then at it again, noticing it sitting idly on the bricked path, shrouded in red. Those drops falling off the hovering tree and on the leaf, surely they must tickle it a little?

This view in front of my eyes looks flushed in Kodak, crippled brown on red. It is the kind of image which seems to have been touched up on Photoshop, you know, the kind where you would tweak up the hue and drag the saturation bar just a bit. But that's just it – this is true blue natural polychrome. The kind that instead, induces me to mentally draw out my red marker and criss-cross four lines to carve it out from the rest of my worldview. Emirates Airlines used to do that in one of their television commercials in the late nineties. They would freeze the screen image and with a finger, draw pastel red rectangles around intricate and small details like a limousine waiting for the Emirates passenger, to illustrate how Emirates believed the devil lay in the details.

But I digress. My leaf isn't done yet. I wonder what it looks like in grayscale. Or maybe grayscale with a shade of crippled brown. Whatever the shade, confining images into a frame is a compulsive disorder I have come to terms with. Much like Ricky, the teenaged videographer in American Beauty, who sees beauty in a plastic bag swirling in the wind, I am prone to letting time drift on a frame and lap up the reel. The leaf appears dreamily intense. In its innocuous stillness, it asks me of nothing and indeed, there is a melancholic air to my mental image. But it also believes that if I let my eyes linger, I could look deeper into the frame I have built around it and delve into its connotations. It's the stuff flash frames are made of, and often, it is the way one connects to a memory. Perhaps even another image.

***

"...Mansur isn't the most photogenic vocalist. Worse, he is also ridden with geriatric wrinkles and reams of wisdom on his forehead. But most of that highlights and yet awes you when you stare at his image. His eyes closed, he looks inward at the edge of his photograph, his head tilted as though in deference to his music, and his long forehead reaching up. The rectangular frame cuts off his receding hair, a scruffy curly mix of age and youth, and moves into an unexplained open and soft-toned background. It turns left, traversing the empty gray backdrop. His blurred right shoulder is in contrast to his focused face, his chin clipped by the edge of the photo. The folds of his kurta on the left shoulder shimmer gently in the light and the frame brushes over it crossing a grainy black expanse to complete the rectangle. All in grayscale. A thin silver line envelopes his frame against a stark white background, with his name lettered - also in silver - as a broad bold footnote. The light punctuates his face with a definitive lilt..."

***

The frame is a delicate, and often, neglected and accidental art. A professor in the Arts School at Stanford University once aptly termed the camera a "democratic institution". It is not going to make autocratic judgments about the outcome of your click. Sure, you can alter reality with a set of filters in front of the lens, but that isn't the camera doing a deceptive trick on you. It will see what you wish it to see. And it might pay to realise, as gleaned from the Minolta camera advertisements in 1976, that, you are the camera and the camera is you. The latest multifunctional digital SLR cameras come riddled with an army of buttons but they don't tell you, not even in the footnoted disclaimers in miniature art, that the viewfinder is really in want of an eye. One which can scan and criss-cross red borders to etch out that particular image which makes a viewer connect it to her own set of flash frames.

Numerous books demonstrate, replete with illustrations and actual models, how to hold the camera, how to squat and how to press your back against the wall, in order to take that angled shot. Like an obedient school boy, the photographer's left hand cradles and rotates the lens, scanning his scene, trying to punctuate it at the right places, forming mental frames, shaking his head, and focusing the camera with his trained eye on a jagged set of points in space, and time.

As a competent and idling dreamer, I realize what it means to jog through space and time. It has become habit for me to extract an image from around me and toss it in my mind. I run the hours through the frame and see it take form from a blue dawn to an acute dusk. I will have in the process, spent another fifteen minutes displaying an utter lack of productivity, while my frame would have shook its head in disbelief and carried on with its routine. I console myself thinking great photographers probably did just that. If Henri-Cartier Bresson feels "that the most important thing lay elsewhere, in roaming freely at the disposal of the eye", then that's just the way it must be. Bresson, a photographer who saw almost the entire twentieth century through his lens, is known for his sensitivity in his photographs as much as his disregard for rules. The Michel Gabriel photograph taken in 1952 on Rue Mouffetard in Paris, the one with the boy smiling and looking away from the camera as he walks around the corner, is the one he appears to be pointing to when he says photography is "a way of shouting, of freeing oneself, not of proving or asserting one's own originality. It is a way of life." The boy, perhaps aged ten, hair disheveled and a loosened belt around his shorts, is cradling two bottles of (probably) wine between his arms as much with an air of triumph as with glee and a sense of liberty.

This isn't about the special effects of two creative spot lights shining down on the kid. Or having the boy go through a couple of takes till he finally learns to look away from the lens. Or even asking the boy's father if it was okay to show his kid with wine. Bresson, a painter originally and then, again, later on in his life, was always in an effort to capture life. He'd see what you would see. But I think he would let his eyes linger just a little more.

You could imagine him gazing and holding still for an instant after sighting a frame. He would redirect his lens locking onto a point in space, stopping the clock on that moment, and with the shutter closing on his Leica, hear the frame being carved out of the scene. Left for generations to interpret, toss and relive its timelessness. Bresson's frames, like so many frames, lull me into introspection. It must be the light.

***

"...a generous sweep of light brushes past his face across his left cheek and diffusing through across the forehead and the back of his ear. I wonder what he is thinking. Or if he is thinking at all. Or if he doesn't give a damn what I think. He is there to sing and he probably isn't even aware of the photographer's existence either. The light hints across his right eye, glowing as a small spot on the closed eyelid. The right side of his face, shunned by light, paints itself dark and you faintly make out a dimple on his right cheek. A hollow sinking in. His skin bulges out a little above his right eye, and you follow the lines running across his forehead. A slight meditative frown on his forehead pronounces the deep contours of his weathered lines, and his mouth is just barely open, as though hesitant to sing. His two faces look back at you with a deep sense of purpose. The chin and head, cut off by the frame, keep you guessing. Does he have a square jaw? Maybe the hair is receding only on the sides. Pensive lips? Subtly gaping teeth, for sure. A wide nose, oily on its edges, and experience all the way up the forehead. Is he singing something? Is this one from the archives? For the archives? This is violent eloquence."

***

These are images which have always relied on the implicit. And poke you to look at them again and again. And then once more, often telling you something different each time. They are not restrictive though Bresson calls it 'trapping life'. Mary Price even authors a book titled The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space. And yet to me, these images liberate. They are a composition of ideas, moments and emotions, as much as they are a mere confluence of space and time. The borders and light always reveal more than they conceal. You could tear up a photograph into pieces, triumphantly destroying its rectangular border. And then realise you might now have a hundred more frames, each victorious in its jaggedness. How we choose a frame around objects often dictates which parallel reverie we would stroll through. And that isn't necessarily an image.

It is a perverse art in many ways, the high ground of Peeping Toms, and one in which the photographer is always attempting to trap the unguarded moment. Steve McCurry, renowned for his haunting image of Sharbat Gula, the Afghan girl, then a refugee in Pakistan in 1985, says his portraits "speak a desire for human connection; a desire so strong that people who know they will never see me again open themselves to the camera, all in the hope that at the other end someone else will be watching – someone who will laugh or suffer with them." Sharbat Gula – now around thirty years old, like countless other unidentified subjects, might wonder helplessly about her perhaps unwanted fame but will resign to the fact that her piercing, haunting green eyes would continue to be the symbol of a refugee around the world.

And then, there are little known frames such as the one by Robert Capa. No, not the 'Falling Soldier' photograph. This one's much later, of a blonde haired kid, perhaps eight years old, sitting atop a battle tank in Paris, just after the liberation of the city in August 1944. Dressed in a small jacket and shorts, he sits assured atop the tank, staring down at the camera from the corner of his eye, his right palm on his shin like a new heir to the throne and his mouth giving a hint of scorn and a smile. His left index finger probes its way up his nose.

The National Geographic terms those moments and frames as the ones that almost made it. To me, having seen them, they are the ones that almost got away. Every month, their editors pick out one snap from a bunch of snaps taken by numerous field photographers from the myriad assignments. A snap they thought that didn't fit in with the article and the content that month, but one which fell neatly in the cracks between those articles. In December 2003, they picked out one from Pablo Corral Vega's assignment on Argentine tango, a reprieve and a melancholic respite for a passionate but economically ravaged nation thriving on its prowess in soccer and now, tennis. The image they fished out shows a dimly lit ballroom with a lone couple in the dance arena. Carlos Govito, a tango virtuoso stands with his hands on his side, leaning slightly towards his partner, Mariana Dragone. His nose brushes past her right cheek, as she smudges her face softly on his. Tilting her body as far as it would take her onto him, testing her balance and trust. For him to quite simply, be there. Her hands, swaying back in abandon. Their eyes, shut.

They called it quiet intensity.

***

"...Quiet?! Look at the intensity, look at his eyes! Do you see that lone vein across his eyelid? And that lit dimple on his left cheek? A late evening practice session at home, that's where he must be in this frame. Alone in time and space, without an audience, his hands must be gesturing wildly, his head rising and falling with the cadence, his eyes opened up to me a moment ago, twinkling. Yes, twinkling! Light dances across his face, now rubbing down the right half. Listen! Listen as he takes the note high, crashes it on your ear drum, draws you in with his eyes, meditates within you, makes you shut your eyes, makes you count the rhythmic cycle, sweeps you with his acumen, and rises to a peak. Then drops off to end the raga closing his eyes inward letting you take in the quiet." Click.

***

A photograph, I perceive from what I have seen, is a religion as much as it is an art. A philosophy as much as a science. And like most things of depth, they all probably mean the same in the end. Of thinking outside the box, within the box. I do not know when Raghu Rai met Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur for that photograph. It was to be part of his book of photographs of Indian classical musicians. I do not know if the book is out yet either. Attending a talk in Calcutta three years ago, I heard him speak of the frame and how the camera knows nothing beyond it.

Flash frames. Picasso on the beach. Yellowstone. The iron girders of the Empire State Building while in construction. Ladakh. A war in Robert Capa's eyes. A dead leaf. Raghu Rai on Mallikarjun Mansur. Apply yourself to anything of depth long enough and you trespass the boundaries that words or frames tend to make. As Susan Sontag, the late American writer, mused, "After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed."

The leaf shivers, limply swirling in the wind, and fades into obscurity. I gaze at Mallikarjun Mansur's face, meshed, flitting and fleeting.

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