Other People's Pictures

What do you do when you're in such a funk that you don't feel like looking at yourself in the mirror (unless it's with two halves of a peanut in place of your front teeth, making yourself laugh, demented, I know)? For the past week, I barely remember being out of the house (I did go to college at some point though because I remember running away from the noise of my classroom several times to go off on my own to smoke, or drink coffee, or on invented chores). I was in my bed, devouring books and living in worlds of someone Else's creation (and watching Community and Family Guy, like Dev said). Or in vivid, happy or morbid dreams.
Today I bunked college again, feeling like shit in the morning. I wake up and go to sleep everyday with anxieties and possibilities of a future that I might not have, stomping around in my head. I took a shower and emerged scrubbed, soft, smelling of cranberries. I put on kajal just so that the girl in the mirror doesn't look like some lawaris laash they picked up from under a flyover. And I did what I love doing the most, plunged into a past that's not mine. Today I felt like time trippin' in the 70s. It's been some time now that I've been obsessively looking at this collection of Pablo Bartholomew's work. I'd seen it a while ago and recollected it when I was looking at the works of this other favourite of mine called Joe Szabo and also of filmmaker and photographer Larry Clark
I love candid photographs of adolescents, because you take a million photographs of your friends all the time and there's a sense of identification when you see pictures of other people's friends at any time in history, because at some level, young people all look the same.

With Bartholomew, these pictures are his life, portraits of his friends and his world in the 70s, during his formative years as a photographer and as a person, age 15-25. (A lot of the pictures are of) My city, the same places as I hang out in, doing the things we do (after trip self portraits!). Living rooms, bedrooms, piles of people laying around, smoking, laughing, objects that may seem now to be ancient in their old avatars. It's a sense of "this is who we are and this is where we're going to be all our lives..... right?".

You can feel these people through his photographs, and know them - the girls who look you straight in the eye with piercing matter of factness that you don't possess (you'd love to meet one of them), the one with her head on her knees and the cigarette in her hand, effortlessly confident girls pouting with head thrown over shoulder. 

You want to be in these photographs, you want to take these photographs. 

The next one I'd like to mention is Larry Clark, photographer and maker of films about beautiful and fucked up young nymphs, bored and deranged small town youths (specially skateboarders) and a fascination for barely clothed adolescent boys that will leave you feeling vaguely dirty, like an X rated version of Calvin Klein ad. He started off also very young, taking pictures of people he hung out with in his hometown of Tulsa, junkies, teenage mothers, skateboarders, generally hormonal kids. And it's got the flesh and blood aspect down, stripped totally to the bone. 

You identify with it even though you've not been to the little "hick" towns that he wanders around in, because you identify with the vulnerability, the boredom, the "I can't possibly be doing something wrong because I look so fucking cool". The way time seems to crawl when you're at that age, feeling like no one has ever been where I am and felt what I feel.  

Next up is Joe Szabo whose photos look like something out of Dazed and Confused (the film, not the magazine, in fact I think Cameron Crowe wrote an introduction to one of his books).

 His collections Almost Grown, Teenage and Jones Beach capture the bad hair days, the outside school makeouts, the terrible prom outfits, the muscle flexing at the beach, the being alone in a crowd. You see the self consciousness oozing out like pheromones from the photographs.

Since I've been looking at other people's pictures for so long (these ones, tumblr, flickr, random google image searches leading to stalking myspace, twitter, blogs etc) I decided to look at my parent's old albums. We spent a couple of hours looking through them, the ones of my mother before she was married, the ones of her wedding, the ones after. The black and white ones first, then the coloured ones after my brother and I appeared on the scene. Is it just me or are they all better photographed? Some of them are in studios but there's just more care and love that's spent in taking a photograph, a sense that this has to be right, even the candid ones that happen by accident. Or maybe people just look more beautiful in black and white. Either way, here's some of my family, mostly my mom. Sadly I don't really bear much resemblance to the Joshis, though I am one temperamentally. I'm apparently the spitting image of my father, my dadi and now a creepy carbon copy of my brother (Sebastian and Viola, we're called)

Top left: Her and her 3 best friends. Next, her and B Masi. Bottom Left: Her and V. Mama (see: Lalpania Diaries) next, her modeling for an local ad for bags.

This one is around age 14 or 15. The banner says "Revolution! Liberation for Losers! (khilao!!!)" I have no idea wtf is going on in this picture. Apparently the sign is a parody of the signs she used to make for her older brother (At that time another kurta clad JNU marxist), the "Chinese" looking man is supposed to be a pseudo-Mao (the khilao is supposed to be because they sucked at sports, and hence were losers)
The stunningly beautiful woman in this picture is my Nani, next to her Ma is showing off her new watch while V. Mama sulks because he wanted to take the picture. The next one is again Ma as a teenager... 

Someone please alert the Sartorialist

  This is her and I. Masi in Almora And below is her and the gang in Bombay, Ullhas Nagar (with B Masi next to her)

Being murdered by a deranged Afghan, some play. The other one is of Ibsen's A Doll's House.

With Rajesh Khanna at some random party. They were so excited. "M. was so chalaak, just when the picture was being clicked, she said 'Raju!' and turned him towards her so it looks like he was talking to her the whole time"

Here's one of my dad as a youngling, probably in his NDA days, judging by the haircut. 

And here's one with my mum soon after their wedding.

To end, here is her face, another studio shot I think. Sorry the photo is kind of curvy it's kind of folded that way.