Looking For Signs is an experience of India made through the expressive frame of a hand held camera. The snapshot vision is used as a means of fluid and creative documentation of social spaces and experiences of the self, set in the atmosphere and dynamic arena of India. The artistic territory of this art is located within existential, abstract and fragmented social encounters. A fleeting convergence of appearances and dissolutions, where self and other, collide and merge through the meeting point of a camera. The snapshot aesthetic, with its ease, its lack of hierarchies and pictorial energy is utilized here within the broad language of fine art, where meaning is open, expanded and uncertain. These subjective photographs of travel are made in the mind, where the camera mediates between appearance, experience and idea. My motivation is one of a pilgrim and not a tourist.
This book is an unfolding of time and narrative, a cinematic flow of appearances. The sense of movement and journey is also embedded in the images themselves where social encounters with appearances unfold ‘as a passing show’. Here expressive picture making collides and entangles with the specificity and ecosystem of communities, culture and drama of place.
India is a complex, dynamic, deep-rooted enlightened culture, containing dualities and social contrasts. Alongside this experience of the subcontinent of India, there is a self-awareness of the dynamics of the outsider as image-maker. Equally celebrated here are encounters with a diverse range of images, artefacts and signages as they are presented, displayed and experienced within public spaces. Collectively here they speak of representation and its complexity.
- Peter Finnemore