Spring Issue: TALES

Note from the Editor:

For the maiden issue of Parcham we have received a diverse range of submissions from photographers. So, when I was asked to sort this cluster according to the themes and tropes that run through these, I found myself in veritable pressure. As I browsed through the images that are so dissimilar in style and mood, it was almost impossible to impose any order on them.

Nevertheless, what is traceable is a recurrent tendency to document the small things, the often unnoticed, the less significant. This could be a cat or a goat in the roadside or a brazen statue that lies in some corner, discarded long back. Abhik Misra shares three monochromatic frames that evokes uncanny in some of the most commonplaces in our surroundings. Abhradeep Ganguli documents “motion and moment in fragmentation, without interrupting the action, rather using observation as a tool” in capturing the everyday face. Whereas Arka Dey shifts our focus to a series of gloomy lowlands, seen from a very sensitive and keen eyes, Anustup Roy roams in some distant hill village and brings out some never-told-yet-always-taking-place tales. Debarghya Goswami shares a series of haunting images shot over a course of time. Ipsita Deb dwells on some fragments of memories that are always incomplete. Kanak records the everyday ‘identical’ city lives one lets go by which is “a mirror of identical lives, identical good mornings and good nights”. Suranjay’s is an attempt to document
spaces that are fleeting and fading. Yudhajit Basu travels across four different locales and times, sometimes to a sleepy lesser-known dreamy village of Purulia, or sometimes through the alleyways of his mega city. It is this bringing to life of these small things that
are often overlooked or never-seen-in-this-way that forms the very aesthetics that the Photography section of Parcham (and for the subsequent issues as well) thrives on. We would call this cluster — “Tales” . — Ipsita Deb