Suchitra Vijayan
Age: 27
Nationality : Indian
Residence: New York City / Kabul
“… the written word is not a true document after all. The photograph is the true document parexceelence. People let themselves be convinced by a photograph” – Sebald
In Barthes’s Camera Lucida (p84) there is a picture of boy from 1900’s, standing next to a desk. Underneath the image Barthes asks, “ Is it possible that Ernest is still alive today: but where? How? What a novel!”. Only photographs posses this intimate quality that demands the viewer to re-imagine and reinvent stories. The images here are stripped of captions for the very same reason – to place demands on the viewer to ask and engage. As Barthes would have it, the photograph “is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This.” There it is: these photograph are to anchor the testimony to truth, the fiction to fact. This philosophy informs my photography.
My photographs are means to an affliction, that resemble an aide-mémoire. I had ambitiously set out rejecting all accessories or anecdotes of the past; arriving freshly naïve, untouched by cynicism to document the chaos that this world is – to document everyday fiction. I place enormous reliance on the process of photographing the scenes of tangible destruction, as a means of normalising the contingency before me. My photographs are also admissible evidence of another kind of complicity – an event of destruction; the circus of aid, journalism from a compromised moral position and to altered narratives that fit neatly into a slotted story. These photographs exist because, for me, often words struggle to identify the particular, the photograph effortlessly indicates a particularness that stands in metonymically for the universal.
