First Look

During the psychedelic morning rush at Andheri station, Avanti Bhati, 25, researcher and occasional photographer, saw a man wearing an interesting cap. “I asked if I could take a picture,” she recalls, “and in response, he just swept off his cap to reveal a bald, shining head, gave a big smile to the camera and walked off, lost immediately in the huge crowd.” The encounter lasted barely a minute, but to Bhati, it has come to represent the city with its unexpected, fleeting moments of human connections. 

Bhati is part of a group of five young professionals, twenty-somethings and recent migrants from places like Bhopal, Bangalore and Delhi, who have been photographing their encounters with the city over the past year. “Moving to Mumbai is a visual shock,” says Rishi Arya, a chartered accountant working with a multinational bank.

“We wanted to capture the rawness of these first impressions before they became routine parts of the landscape for us.” Shot on mobile phones, aim-and-shoot digital cameras and “very basic SLRs” the photographs aim at communicating the relationship the city has with their lives. 

Taken on the move, the blurred images reflect the fast paced, selective connection these young professionals have with Mumbai. “Our aim was not to capture all aspects of the city and its realities”, says Arya. “If it isn’t part of our lives, you won’t see it in our pictures.”

That’s why there are few slums or social issues in their images, just the everyday rhythms of their lives buffered by the metropolis. 

The city is theirs by choice. “More than anywhere else, this is the place where you can be part of big things, live your life fully”, says Arya. It is the place they have picked when they are young and free. It is, in that sense, the centre of their dreams, and inevitably, of their disappointments.

“I feel that Mumbai has a lot of life but no soul,” says Meghana Singh, 25, corporate lawyer. “There is a lot of angst in the way we relate to it.” To a Mumbaikar it may not be that evident, adds Bhati, “but an outsider looking at our photographs will pick up the love-hate vibes immediately.”

After almost a year of work, the group’s images show highly personal visions of Mumbai. For Arya, who travels abroad frequently, “the city begins at the airport as I leave; it is the contrast I feel when I return.”

Nithya Reddy, a lawyer who works at Nariman Point, finds the three-minute, tree-lined walk from the taxi stand to her office “almost magically in contrast to the rest of the city”.

And Singh found her lens turning inward, towards her domestic space, after she had to move house three times in less than two years. “A lot of it is mundane stuff,” says Roshni Shanker, Singh’s colleague and former classmate, “but what it’s trying to say is — we are also part of the city, we form a special note in its buzz.” 

For Reddy, only the Maximum City could have pushed her into this kind of exploration. “No other place demands to be captured and experienced in the fullest form,” she says.

“Taking photographs has changed the way I see Mumbai.” For Bhati, the act of photography has served as a ticket to becoming one with the city. “On a train, you raise your camera, look through the viewfinder. Women look back, you smile, they smile, a conversation begins. Almost before you know it, you are part of the picture.”

This project is supported by PUKAR under its Youth Fellowship programme for 2007. Presentations for all fellowships will be made on June 3 at the PL Deshpande Maharashtra Kala Academy, Prabhadevi, from 6pm onwards.