‘To acquire things naturally is my premise’

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“It’s the opening part of a camera and also symbolises the eye of a lensman.” Rightly captioned her collection as Apertures, adept photographer Jyotica Sikand sounds assertive about the name.

“Well, you may call it the best of both worlds, because this particular series of snapshots contains pictures that have been clicked with a very old-fashioned ordinary SLR camera as well as a more updated, recent digital version. So, I have clubbed both sides of the story to put up this show together,” shares the seasoned snapper.
While the Apertures array was widely appreciated when exhibited in her solo show at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre last year, the recent Kolkata showcase at the Weavers’ Studio — Centre for the Arts, comparatively witnessed a tepid response. “Though I’ve lots of friends and relatives staying in Kolkata, people here hardly know me,” she avers logically. “Back home in Delhi, the scene was diametrically different. A huge sales-figure was notched up as out of 60 photographs on display, 40 were sold out. In contrast, only a meagre few from a total of 40 pictures was purchased by the prospective clients in the culture capital. It was a close-knit affair and only a select gathering of art aficionados and patrons had graced the event to get a feel of my work,” she recollects. Nonetheless, Sikand would love to thank her stars for the simple reason that it could manage to hit a pot of luck finally, when famous actress Moonmoon Sen had dropped in to catch a glimpse of her gallery splurge. Also a curator-connoisseur in her own right, Sen has a refined taste for exquisite art. “She was instantly impressed by my colourful collage and readily bought two pictures from the motley oeuvre on offer. She made my day actually!” she gushes in praise.
That she is not a professional shutterbug, Sikand agrees about herself and says that she had enrolled into a photography course way back in 2003. Driven by an initial inclination towards black and white images of people, she pursued a short course in the camera craft. In the last five years, Sikand has been relentlessly shooting sites of historical importance or at the popular tourist spots. From doors, windows, arches, gateways, eyeholes to several other structures — be it designed, plain, uneven, asymmetrical, smooth, rough, undulated, complex, simple, usual, unusual, prosaic, poetic, bizarre, or behemoth, Sikand’s miniature clicking device has zoomed in on everything and anything grotesque, quaint or curious under the sun. “I guess, any aspirant just needs to have a keen eye for detail and good observation power to arrest a source before he/she dives in to further cultivate it to its core,” comes her word of advice.
Accompanied with a fervent zeal in heart and a fancy gizmo in her kitty, Sikand globe-trotted from one place to another like a thirsty traveller on an expedition to discover unknown horizons. “If seeing is believing, then I had experienced it uncountable times in my life. I drank in the beauty that I was bedazzled with and captured the picturesque locations forever on my lens. Of course, my memory has freeze-framed all of them to be permanently etched out on the mind-slate,” she reveals. “I’ve visited nations like Uzbekistan and Turkey wherein monuments, mausoleums, mosques, forts, gardens, bulbous and curvaceous domes, slender minarets and museums hold a testimony to their predominant Islamic faith, lustrous Persian architecture, as sublime as the Mughal specimens of beauty like the eternal Taj Mahal or the timeless Fatehpur Sikri. On the other hand, countries like Spain or Italy represent the salient European features, cultural codes of the Occident, the characteristic Greek-Romanesque Gothic structures bearing long towering colonnades, church-like erected constructions and the magical medieval traits. The arches, the ribbed vaults and the flying buttresses are its signature styles,” she further elaborates. “They are all structural beauties and look ethereal in grace. And if you ask me my most favourite place to take snaps in India, then it has to be the Jantar Mantar in Delhi because of its geometrical shapes. It gave me the best shot to marvel at,” she sounds elated.
Covering people at work on the pavements, hawkers selling their wares, shopkeepers tending to their customers, Sikand initially catered to light pleasure-reading magazines in black and white print to bolster her craft. From figurative compositions, the spotlight gradually switched gears to imprison structures and places on frame. “Well, to hunt out the grist for my photographic mills, I took frequent trips to various holiday destinations which became my favourite haunts to let my hair down and go on a click-happy mode. This hobby acted as a de-stressing agent to me,” she confides.
In Goa and Ladakh, Sikand vouches for the colourful theme of doors and windows to come up in her assemblage of Apertures. In fact, one of her first pictures taken were of the government buildings in Goa and of the majestic monasteries in Ladakh.
Given to seizing snatches of the antiquated, aristocratic heritage buildings that keep crumbling with the passage of time, this lenswoman ascertains that these aeons-old edifices spell out a magical aura around their walls and compounds. Although frozen in a time-warp of long-lost ages, they radiate a distinct brilliance and purity via their louvers and pigeon-holes. She also likes to capture Goa, since the coastal province was once ruled by the Portuguese. “Whereas, lower down in the Deccan plateau, Pondicherry (now Puducherry), remained a French colony for several years,” she chips in.
Unlike staunch and well-trained professionals, who mostly click at the break of dawn, Sikand prefers to laze out and wallow in with her morning siesta, when she takes a break from her job. Endorsing her opinion strongly that photographs usually beget a better output when clicked in a temperate zone rather than tropical, Sikand suggests that
“Till date, I got the best product in Europe. The continent is my favourite location from an architectural point of view. Around December in Spain, the weather was cloudy and there was incessant rain pouring in. But even in this gloomy atmosphere, I got a string of most lovely and breathtaking pictures,” she notes.
She’s not one to see her creative pixels getting photoshopped. “I don’t like anything artificial. To acquire things naturally is my foremost premise. With colouring contrasts, brightness and granular adjustments, photographs look very cosmetic and the presentation seems synthetic. If only certain unwanted items accidentally stray into the frame, then I carefully crop that portion off,” she says.