India: Light from Darkness
An exploration of appearing and disappearing form, fading and returning memory, the nature of stillness and movement, the eye hunting beauty.
A series of images drawn from my past. I decided to scan in from an old contact sheet I found recently. I have played around a little with the contrast. The majority of these photographs were taken in strong morning light. I like the way the images appear and disappear within themselves as well as the dust and scratches that make the images less of a neutral photographic record and more akin to memory itself.
Classical Indian temples are modelled on the World Mountain, Meru. They represent every level of being and consciousness. Vibrant and dynamic on the outside, the are often remarkably small on the inside, cool and dark, with less ornamentation, but a profound sense of spiritual residue and a weight of time.
One of the most appealing things to me, in all things ancient, is there worn and smoothed images. Precise imagery and iconography becomes increasingly vague and amorphous, but somehow more animate and numinous. In these two images of a Jain temple facade, I have further abstracted the patterns by increasing the contrast quite considerably - a technique I used to use in my block prints.
