What can a photo do?

"Even though individuals are born, work, laugh and die everywhere in the same way, they cannot be denied the determining weight of history, of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices and conflicts",

and elsewhere

"the camera interrogates"

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Revolution

When one begins to know oneself more and more, it seems as though there is no option but to become more and more alone. I have discovered more from art, from the process of understanding it, and attempting to create it, and in turn, understood more about my life; than anything else. Experience alone is not understandable. Reason alone can never be enough to comprehend what has happened and what may happen, and the choices in between or the lack of choices in between. In this, I have learnt that imagination is more important than knowledge. And that love and truth are the only things that can set you free, and that without either of those, there is nothing called art. I like this quote by Gauguin "Art is either plagiarism or revolution". Not large, noisy revolutions, but quiet moral stances, unbending, compassionate, and relentless.

I say you get out!

I Say You Get Out! Today is not a very good day as I have been basically feeling sorry for myself, for my poverty-stricken status, for how difficult it is to pursue Art (naturally this must be in capital letters), for a one and a million things that generally I have no business feeling sorry for and yet today, I must. I chucked in the towel as soon as I got up and called in a There's No Way I Can Drag Myself Out Of Bed into work, and am prostrate on my bed that substitutes for a couch having drunk copious amounts of good quality coffee that I can no longer afford, and generally feeling a sorry for myself, or as one writer puts it I HAZ A SAD!! Giving myself a tight slap now. Peeyow!!! Wahhh that hurt leh. Okay back to reality.

I met a girl

I met a girl today, young, beautiful, with the world in front of her. She is just 21, about to graduate from college. Already, she has seen too much of the world; while others her age were opening kegs or glossy magazines, debating which shoes or bag to buy, or yet others, competing furiously for lucrative internships or well-connected jobs on the Hill, she decided to take a year off college, when she couldn't afford to pay for it, and went to a country that shall continue to be unnamed (not Lanka) and worked with refugees for over a year, setting and running a nonprofit that dealt with resettlement, psychosocial trauma, and gender based violence. She survived frequent sexual harassment, and intense loneliness, away from everyone she knew, and very far away from a world that made sense. If the phone rang, it would always be an emergency. After a year, she was back in the United States, watching events unfold in the country that she had left behind, 'freaking out', spending nights and days tense and anxious, worrying about the safety of those she had left behind. I met this girl, who I had never met before, today, connected through a friend as she was looking for a job, for a year of peace and stability and no doubt healing, before applying to grad school. I recognized this girl; impossibly young, but I thought she was older than many of my grad school classmates at 30; from the way she talked, her grasp of policy, her kindness and most of all, her quietness. I thought about the things that she had seen, which no childhood could have prepared her for; and I recognized her loneliness in the modern world, and her sense of being out of place, everywhere she went. Most of all, I understood her confusion about the path that lay in front of her, and the choices she had to make. I hope she sticks to the courage she has shown, but I also hope that she becomes happy in the life she makes for herself, and sometimes the two paths do not converge.

Ships

"A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for", - Grace Hopper.