‘Sounds’ to resound artistic fervour of blind photographers

CHANDIGARH: 'Sounds', an exhibition of photographs by five visually impaired young photographers will be inaugurated by home secretary, UT administration, Anurag Agarwal at Government Museum and Art Gallery on Friday. The exhibition will be on display from August 11 to August 14, at Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh.
Anjan Sharen, Milan Sharma, Phani Paul, Tinku Hazra and Dulaal Chand Roy first picked a camera during an innovative photography workshop conducted by young photographers Padmaja Gungun and Chandan.The workshop was conducted at The Society for Blind, a small centre in Seoraphuli of Hooghly district in West Bengal in April 2014. The two photographers were inspired by a blind photographer’s character in the film ‘Ship of Theseus’ and were encouraged to do extensive research about visually impaired photographers and their modes of communication in different parts of the world. With this research and further study, Padmaja and Chandan devised and curated the module of a workshop.
These photographs were first exhibited in Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur in 2016, with generous help of friends and now will be organised with the help of Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi.
Talking about the workshop, Padmaja said several conversations with the five young men created a ground for a creative collaboration and the one question that came up in all their minds was, ‘how photographs can be clicked without seeing.’ “We suggested that the photographer should know by listening and discover by touching. It wad Tinku who realised that we wanted the photographers to infer from listening and touchihng,” said Padmaja.
When the participants held their camera for the first time, Padmaja recalls how they kept sitting with the cameras in their hands and then memorized the click button by pressing it and hearing the sound of the shutter.
The photos on display are what these students have inferred, and seem to align the entire process at one merging dot. On that dot, it's as if the visible world sounds, resounds.