Deemed Vision

" In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture"
- Walter Benjamin, Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.

2/3 of our communication is nonverbal, which means, about 70% per cent of what we are and what is made of our personalities is through the body.

This project is an exploration of the systems of social interpretation that didn’t succeed in being formed. The idea is to shift the viewer's focus, from the specificity of a person, a story, the countenance, to the experience of something much more universal. Simultaneously, the focus on the mannerisms of a body ties this faceless individual to their cultural, political, and social peculiarities.

With only the topic of conversation revealed, the interpretation and observation are left to the imagination and associations of the viewer.

We moved into the idea of Gaze - of the familiar, with the familiar and on the familiar. The study was to gauge the affective nature of the camera on everyday life, and relationships and hold on to what was real and what wasn't - for the subject, the photographer and the audience alike.

Three case studies were conducted. One pair was an individual being shot by her roommate on camera, the second was a couple being shot by a friend on camera and the third was a classmate being shot by another classmate when in conversation.

The idea was to understand the change in behaviour in front of the camera over one image v/s over a prolonged period. The body language of an individual who shares a room with another and how that affects her behaviour in the form of recording equipment, the other of a highly volatile couple and their known aggressiveness and what the camera does to their behaviour and the last of a classmate who the photographer did not know too well but managed to sit in the bedroom for at least an hour.

While developing these images, the photographs were shown to strangers and interpretations of the same were brought out. More often than not, the interpretation was the exact opposite of what their behaviour was, when the camera was not recording them.