Friday, November 29, 2013

Vintage love.


Just a day away from showing Photo + at the AWC fair, Trident BKC, Mumbai.  The experience and response this far has been overwhelming to say the least.  The madness of putting together a gig has unleashed! With much effort I squeeze just one more post from the range..

Sharing with you a few images that use vintage photography for inspiration.  These images are reproductions of  old photographs I have collected  over the years.

The history of early studio photography and the portrayal of women therein is utterly fascinating. A detailed post on the subject would be pertinent. Promise to come back with one later..
Until then, here are a few vintage photo boxes and more from from Photo+ ..

Antique Teak Box

Vintage photo stool


The prince's wardrobe


Skirt, Jaipur 


Have uploaded most images from the collection on to my facebook page. Check it out here.

Look forward to seeing those who can make it at the AWC fair tomorrow!





Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Photo boxes

Letters to God,  Limited edition fine art print


These are much photographed times, and each one of us is a photographer. For many like me, taking images and sharing them is a fundamental way of consuming life. To the extent that I don't quite know what to make of the visible unless I  have framed it in a photograph !

In my mind I never stop composing pictures, reading light and calculating exposure values.
It is a problem! Gone are the days when Dad's Yashica would be pulled out of its bag for special occasions, holidays, birthdays and festivals...I have to put the camera away on important occasions lest I  forget to enjoy and  just be there rather than hyper record and lose the moment completely!

The most pleasurable part of taking the picture is actually seeing it in print! Never mind the digital revolution, nothing beats an actual picture that one can feel, better still process it with ones own hands!
Even when a dark room is no longer easily available, the thrill of receiving those `do not bend' envelopes from the printers that come bearing your work is truly indescribable.

One day early this year, I pulled something out of one such  sacrosanct envelope, and bent it! not just that, soaked, tore, plastered and  moulded the photograph ! Sacrilege? right?.. and  how I did suffer too! For this gorgeous textured fiber paper does not print cheap!  

Here are two actual photo boxes then, the first made as a composite of 21 images taken across traditional homes around Rajasthan and Uttarpradesh- The Haveli box. While the second is made with pictures  of random temple walls.


The Haveli box




Letters to God, table top box
























Hand painted detail.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

1968





1968
All women irrespective of age and color might identify with how the immediate family and society in general tries to tame and socialise them as little girls. In my case it just happened overnight,  one fine day, it was not okay to climb trees and play rough and tumble with the boys. Out came sewing kits, and knitting needles. `Learn some thing worthwhile' I was told. The worthwhile usually meant, `just conform.! Remember the Aloo Gobi mum from Bend it like Beckham ?!

Unfortunately for my mother,  every reminder of my peculiarity as a girl child never failed to incite bitter rebellion. Until she at the behest of a other concerned, well meaning ladies of the house, tried to sweeten it for me. Thats when I first  saw the Butterick home sewing catalog she has stashed away among her treasured things!

 Never mind if it was a hand me down from an expat sister or aunt,  and was out of fashion by good 15 years. For somebody growing up in cities with no book stores, the catalog and its quaint illustrations were as good as a big fat juicy illustrated volume of Grimms tales ! ( I know its hard to see the connection now, even I can't decades later!)

Only for that glossy goodness,  did I comply and hang around sewing sessions at home. Which usually meant  hours spent pouring over the funky if somewhat unrealistically proportioned retro hand drawn beauties. On long summer afternoons, as my mother and aunts sat chatting and sewing by the balmy air of a noisy air cooler, the smell of khus permeating the verandah and shrill cries of the brain fever bird as though protesting against the raging mercury outside, I would try my hand at copying the utterly `cool' illustrations.

The Catalog



That Catalog  is completely frayed and battered down to its spine now.  Yet, one look at it and I never fail to go back in time to the company of my mother and the women of my large extended family cutting and sewing ill fitting garments. They would share their hopes, frustrations and dreams over  copious amounts of chilled nimbu paani passing the catalog around. I can, still see each woman's finger print on the book all these years later!

With the 1968 Butterick catalog and the women in particular as a starting point, I started to browse  old book stores in Mumbai for literature pertaining to women around the same time. Could there be a story in what we are told and will tell our daughters? What should a good' accomplished girl be like?  what was my mother told by her mother? Can this be a thread that would help connect me to the times my mother herself was a girl like I was back then, will going back in time help in connect in newer ways now?

It came to me in a bunch of books published between the 1950s and 60s. Books about ideal marriages, about female sexuality and books about women's portrayal  in advertising...I read while I  made the box. Values and ideas so out of step with today, they almost read like trashy fiction ! A curve of sociological evolution each one of us have encountered upward and downward swings of in or own ways, and yet the path ahead looms long and bleaker still!

All this material  layered on to a newly fabricated box went into `1968'. Calligraphy and hand drawn detail adds yet another layer to the final product. The pop colours and bright 60s themed illustrations make it look playful, only a closer looks gives away its  not so flippant story. The box to me is not about design or balance,  not even about perfection. It might mean different things to different people. If it invites feelings and responses of any kind at all, how ever different from mine, do care to share. That is exactly what the box is to me: a conversation, a frustration, a protest, a coming together of all that is progressive as well as regressive in traditions that makes as well as breaks!



Retro details : Frobidden fruit : 60s eye makeup and swimsuits !



Because `good' girls always cook, clean and keep impeccable homes.



Floating, free falling, hand drawn apron ladies + calligraphy


Monday, November 25, 2013

From a chair by the window






Makeshift workspace by the window

What is it  they say about life giving you lemons?  You make lemonade.. right? Cheesy cliches apart,  good lemonade is always worth striving for.

Although today's post has been in the writing for the past four months  its germ has been in mind for over two years. 

"Time is a created thing. 
To say 'I don't have time', is like saying 'I don't want to" 
~ Lao Tzu

Waiting for the right time often becomes a carefully cultivated scam  to avoid implementation. The mind adds to the difficulties real and imaginary,  and before one  knows even the best intentions suffocate slow mo. Only in my case, a few developments at home, not altogether positive forced me to confront this resistance. 

Early  his year construction delays at home and a mishap soon after we moved in had me home bound for an indefinite stretch. As if that was not enough, my digital camera with its dainty dust sensitive sensor had to be  packed away!   I simply had to find an escape from the sheer madness unleashing itself day and and day out. A way out of the noise dust and juggling between focusing on the house, the children and still getting some work done!

The house was in a disarray anyway.  Life was going to be like sitting on a three legged chair for the next six plus months if not more. Would it hurt  anymore if I added to the chaos?  Took up a corner and started to sand paint, colour glue and mess about?!  It is hard mucking about in a clean calm space. But one which is rumbling and shaking like a monster spewing dust belches ?!!

So  in one chaotic corner of the house -a single desk by a window:  Photo + took shape.  Tentatively and one mistake after the other at first,  I had to teach myself restoration of old furniture- trunks mostly.  Sand, prime, paint, detail and varnish.  A little by myself and mostly thanks to the constant hand holding and encouragement of dear friends...(they know who and they know how ;)

Some of you might recollect the project I undertook with the wall niches and old calendars a while back (here).  As an extension of  the niches,  other objects that have been subsequently embellished using paint, paper-mache, decoupage and moulding.


In process.

The  idea has to do with the power of  the authentic object. Calendars, posters, old books. Vintage photography, coins, old hand written letters, postcards endless material that invokes nostalgia and longing.. add to it my own photography which in the past ten years or so has become a map of my life across countries and cultures in a way. Is it possible to pick up an old object and reinvent it with older material?

In a somewhat finished form, the project involves restoring old furniture- trunks, cabinets, stools, platters, boxes and containers etc ( pretty much all I could lay my hands on) and lending them a fresh layer of interest and therefore a new life using layers of old material- collected, inherited and found.

Check out images of some of the handcrafted Photo + art works at  the fabulous Bhavna Bhatnagar's An Indian Summer. I am thankful and thrilled to have her feature my work.

With much trepidation I will launch the initial set of objects coupled with select fine art prints at a day long AWC event at the Trident  hotel BKC  on the 30th of November.

Would love to share stories  about a few  objects over the next few days.  For above all, each painstakingly handcrafted object in the series this far  has multiple stories to tell. Will keep updating my facebook page at Chandan Dubey Photo + simultaneously.

I promise to post continuously over the next four days. See you around 

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Laxmi



Laxmi limited edition fine art print
@
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Chandan-Dubey-Photography-/253623451376709



Wishing all dear readers a very very happy Diwali! 
I had just one more Diwali post to go, only s
ometimes, one needs to tune out the blog and the Internet, power off the camera and be in the moment ! The post shall be uploaded soon .. You have a great day of festivities and family.!

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