Bangalore often rolls off our tongues into our streams of conversation with privileged ease. After all, it is unnatural to be halting about something that resonates so singularly with our ideas of home and belonging. And yet perhaps we do suspect now and then, the facile reduction of a name… that this label of three-syllables might lull us to the profound complexities at play in the entity we so casually describe as our city. Most patently of course, it is a place; and one we recognise well. Its objects of public life are forms that dominate the skyline of our personal stories. But there is more than this concretion of schools and hospitals, offices and residences, parks and malls.
For the city is also a set of practices. It is predicated on myriad human acts. The city is people driving, reading, dying, selling, teaching, cooking, buying, exercising, surviving, drinking, falling in love or discovering new ideas. It is the dramatic event that makes actor-spectators of us all. The city is both the enduring physicality of the stage and the ephemerality of a performance ad hoc. There is a city for the eyes. As there is a city for the mind’s eye. There are many, and there is one. Manufactured as it is, by invisible intentions – often of power, wealth (or its lack) and technology; but sometimes even altruism or aesthetic satisfaction, the city is a product of cultural rather than natural causes. Its economic, social and political factors of production are robustly moored to the ideas, customs and behaviours of its people. This much is true of any city. But it is also the reason why no two cities can be exactly the same.
The photographers featured in the pages that follow, were given an open-ended brief – to catch “the other side of Bangalore”, however they saw it. Despite its ring of duality, the fact that the city has no homogenous “official” side dismantles the danger that the search for the other side would jejunely fall into either or binaries like wealth against indigence or old versus new. Their images share no common program. Neither are they committed to the same experience of the city. They all plunge into the physicality of the visible city while allowing us to read into a Bangalore beyond, though no less real. Even here, some images seem more consciously eager to limn such possibilities, while others are matter-of-fact, and yet others seem indifferent.
But they are, by way of an elemental fact, still in concert. For they allow the peculiar limitation of a lens’ perspective to tell a fragmentary truth about a moment in the life of an organism. Indeed, one whose identity subsumes and depends on our own in ways we can often fail to see. Bryan Richard
Clare Arni, Darshan Manakkal, Gopal MS, Jyothy Karat, Mark Swaroop, Pallon Daruwala, Pervez Rajan, Rudra Rakshit, Rudra Sen, Ryan Lobo, Vinayak Das, Viswajeet Ambat and Vivek M will show at the Time Out Bangalore Anniversary Exhibition this fortnight.
Darshan M
Claire A
A performance at Janapada Jhatre
Village in the city, Viveknagar
Gopal M
Jyothi K
Backstage at a Gubbi Veeranna theatre performance
Children outside makeshift shanties at a construction site in Bangalore
Pallon D
Pervez R
Bombay Anand Bhavan Hotel, Avenue Road
Sheep being herded on H Siddaiah Road
Rudra R
Ryan L
An auto driver stands next to the ongoing Metro construction on MG Road
An elderly gentleman outside a fast-food joint at Lido Mall
Vinayak D
Vishwajeet A
“Fortune telling” robot at Curzon Dairy, in front of Russell Market
Somewhere on Outer Ring Road
Vivek M
Mark S
Break of dawn at the Kyalsanahalli landfill near Hennur
Lamppost at dusk in Lingarajapuram
Mahesh B
Krishanu C
Ramchandra Sharma at Phoenix Watch Works on MG Road.
Construction site for IT complexes in Whitefield
Rudra S
“Three Worlds”: view of UB City from a construction site in the area
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