Most photographers start on the streets. To Tikam Chand, it's his studio. Using an old Carl Zeiss box camera manufactured in 1860, he takes portraits for tourists outside the Hawa Mahal, Jaipur. His 'one minute photos', as he call them, are processed on the spot using the dark room built in to the back of the camera and a bucket he keeps next to him on the pavement.
His Grandfather used the same camera back in the days when not everyone and his monkey had a DSLR slung over their shoulder, and a lot of locals would come to have souvenir photos taken of their trip to the pink city or for identity cards and official documents. The man's an artist, you can see in his movements, his love for his equipment, how he precisely positions his subjects in front of the black sheet he has hanging against a crumbling wall, how he manually exposes the shot by covering the lens for a fraction of a second. Everything this guy does is controlled, calculated.
He got me thinking.It's pretty easy to go out and blast off a memory card in an afternoon in the hope that a few good shots come out, that a couple of moments are captured in the hundred. But is this what photography's about? Has the capacity of digital cameras made us better, or just lazier? One thing's for sure, when Tikam gets home from a days shoot he doesn't turn on his laptop and spend the rest of the night trawling through images over cups of coffee and packs of cigarettes.
To be honest, I envy him.
His Grandfather used the same camera back in the days when not everyone and his monkey had a DSLR slung over their shoulder, and a lot of locals would come to have souvenir photos taken of their trip to the pink city or for identity cards and official documents. The man's an artist, you can see in his movements, his love for his equipment, how he precisely positions his subjects in front of the black sheet he has hanging against a crumbling wall, how he manually exposes the shot by covering the lens for a fraction of a second. Everything this guy does is controlled, calculated.
He got me thinking.It's pretty easy to go out and blast off a memory card in an afternoon in the hope that a few good shots come out, that a couple of moments are captured in the hundred. But is this what photography's about? Has the capacity of digital cameras made us better, or just lazier? One thing's for sure, when Tikam gets home from a days shoot he doesn't turn on his laptop and spend the rest of the night trawling through images over cups of coffee and packs of cigarettes.
To be honest, I envy him.
Did you ask him if he wanted to swap cameras ? I bet he wouldn't.
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