Charon’s Son

CHARON’S SON will be available for sale at the March 18 launch at Drifters Cafe & Bar in Bandra. Join me there at 12 pm for fantastic beer (I dig their IPA) and food. And support my launch by taking home a limited edition print!

The process of Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) can be daunting when it comes to the ratio of good to bad images. For the Aksa Collection, I made two excursions to Aksa Beach in Mumbai in 2022. In each session, I took around 2,000 photos of people along the crowded shoreline. Of those thousands of photos, the culling process is arduous to say the least. That’s because the practice of ICM is about as imperfect of an art form as any in existence. Achieving just the right bit of camera movement to capture a scene with a slow shutter speed is a trick no matter how many times I may have done it. It can be extremely frustrating, especially when something fantastic is happening and all the shots are garbage. And then from the small pool of keepers begins the process of discovering micro scenes within the frame. Can the image be cropped in just such a way so as to give the image a new sense of meaning? And what kind of impact do these highly Impressionist images have on my subconscious?

I may spend quite some time experimenting with an image only to come to the conclusion that nothing’s there. It may look good to me but it doesn’t resonate. And then from the smaller pool of potential pieces, further experimentation is done to see if it’s even possible to create something different from the other images within the same batch or from previous visits. I spend a lot of time removing the tell-tale signs of ICM squiggly lines from an image if necessary because the effect can be too strong. But sometimes, in very rare situations, the camera shake is spot on and the image itself requires just a little bit of post-production - like a song that appears to a songwriter out of nowhere, almost entirely written. When this happens, I couldn’t be happier because it means that I’ve saved potentially hours of time experimenting because the aesthetics are there along with a sense of connection to the image. And it’s all about that for me the longer I practice photography and art: if there’s no connection in the end, I’m not going to bother.

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