Cinema Play House in Paris Photo 2013

http://www.parisphoto.com/paris/artists/nandita-raman#wqQUQJIFMmLgRoYC.01

Photography workshop

I, Brian Paumier and Joaquin taught a workshop to the undergrad students of fine arts at B.H.U (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi in December 2012. Supported by Kriti Gallery.

My Website is up and running. Take a look.

http://www.nanditaraman.com/

Opens on September 7th, Friday. 

Remembering Absent Meaning

Installation shots from the thesis exhibition in New York 2012

Last summer, I visited Banaras and asked my grandfather if he remembered his childhood home, his room and how it had changed over the years. He went from an objective description of the room to remembering people and events located in and around the house. The course of these accounts changed when the question was repeated another day. New associations were made, characters were introduced and fresh emotions were attached to the old narrative. The digressions too made their appearance at different instances in his story, deviating from their prior progression. This made me curious about how memory functions, its relationship to objective reality and time.


The act of recording, sequestering a moment from the continuum of time and detaching things from their context is embedded in the nature of photography. Museums and archeologists preserve objects and edifices too. But how can meaning be preserved? Because meaning is not a disembodied entity that exists on its own. It is bestowed by a conscious, experiencing agent: the rememberer

Robert Shields kept a journal of every minute of his day for more than twenty years. “My Diary is complete. The entire day is accounted for.” He recorded the weight of the daily newspaper, temperature, food prices, his food consumption, nasal hair for genetic analysis and slept in two hour intervals so he could record his dreams. By the time of his death, he had accumulated 35 million words in his diary. However, the affect of these events and actions on him were left out.



Does the form we give our thoughts, the words we select to isolate our ideas, actually work against meaning, making us forget what we thought we once wanted to express? asked Derrida. The act of gathering, sorting and arranging thoughts against a template of grammar is holding sand in one’s fist. A lot is slipping away.



In the no-place of the mirror, the present as the fleeting instant, the past invoked by this moment and the future memory of this reflection might simultaneously gather. What would be the relevance of memory if there were no past, no future; in timelessness?

Cinema Play House installation at Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame. Sep-Dec 2011

I will be there for the closing on July 30th. Would be lovely to have you there.

Cinema Play House -Podcast
http://www.daylightmagazine.org/podcast/september2010-0

Daylight/CDS Photo Awards: Winners Announced!

Written by Taj

It is with great enthusiasm that we make this announcement! We are humbled by and grateful for the positive response and interest to this, the first year, of the Daylight / Center for Documentary Studies Photo Awards; we received 328 entries for the Project Prize and 405 for the Work-in-Process Prize!

Stay tuned over the coming weeks for details about the award exhibitions, multimedia production and online feature of the incredible work produced by these winning photographers.

And now (drumroll please) we present the full list of the Winners, Juror Picks, and Honorable mentions:

PROJECT PRIZE
First Prize Winner
Nandita Raman
Juror Picks
Rachel Barrett (Hank Willis Thomas)
Priya Kambli (Vince Aletti)
Jan Lieske (Jamie Wellford)
Nandita Raman (Julie Saul)
Daniel Stier (Darius Himes and Alec Soth)
Honorable Mentions
Susan Bank
Matt Eich
Jason Florio
Eamon Mac Mahon
Michael Marten
Pierpaolo Mittica
Geir Moseid
Louie Palu
Melissa Ann Pinney
Martin Roemers

WORK-IN-PROCESS PRIZE
First Prize Winner
Elizabeth Moreno
Juror Picks
Erica Allen (Hank Willis Thomas)
Paula McCartney (Darius Himes)
Elizabeth Moreno (Vince Aletti)
Martin Roemers (Jamie Wellford)
Monika Sziladi (Julie Saul and Alec Soth)
Honorable Mentions
Jessica Auer
J Carrier
Dianne Davis
Eyal Dinar
Lorena Endara
Bepi Ghiotti
Maria Gonzalez
Holly Lynton
Sarah Sudhoff
Stratis Vogiatzis

Desire....may be...this is work in progress

more additions to Cinema Play House series...

My connection to the cinema halls originates through my mother's family who owned the first talkies cinema in my hometown, Varanasi, India. My memory is full of visits to this space but I had no photographs of it. This initiated my desire to photograph these transient spaces.

As I photograph the older cinema halls, some of which are still running, I realize, each of these spaces were built in a unique way, designed mostly by the ownerhimself, unlike the homogeneous, modern multiplexes . Over many years of being occupied these halls seem to contain cues to the psyche of the people who built it and who occupy it. I feel an intriguing play of elements in these spaces that is baffling. As if the space and its arrangement is a mirror of the occupier’s interior. It is these reflections, these cues that absorb me; manifestations of interaction between the space and the people, over time.

Ramblings...

The light has gone red not that I am in a hurry. Some cars make use of the green and travel the cross section. Its winter evening and dark already. Waiting, I fail to resist the temptation and roll forward just a few inches. In my rearview mirror I see a car behind mine. The smoke from it makes me think of the temperature outside. That car rolls forward a few inches too.

Cinema Halls in Kolkata

I am so happy I choose to go to Kolkata (Calcutta) to photograph the old cinema halls. There were far more than I had imagined. And by the end of 20 days stay I felt I will have to return to photograph them again. Aside from the cinema halls the city is so engaging. I can relate to it much better than Delhi or Mumbai.

Cinema Halls of India

India has a long association with cinema. The first Indian feature film was made in 1899. Today Bollywood is one of the largest film producers in the world, producing more than 1,000 films a year, with an audience of 3.6 billion people. In the 1980s with the advent of home video, cinema halls went through a period of lull in India. Many theatres closed down. The turn of the century saw a come back of cinema halls, this time with smaller halls and multiple screens catering to the ‘globalised’ consuming middle class.

In the Indian cities the old cinema halls are being converted into multiplexes which look the same whether in India or anywhere else in the world. The old cinema halls, some of which still exist, have a distinct character to them. These spaces tell of aesthetics which are local, often stating the owner’s taste. The employees of the old theatres have a personality of their own unlike the corporate executives at the multiplexes.

I found the old cinema hall spaces particularly evocative of time and changing culture. But their conversion into swanky multiplexes or commercial complexes is only a matter of time. As these spaces will leap into the digital world the trivia around will change. I am documenting these spaces before they become a thing of the past. This is an ongoing project.

This documentation was partly supported by the fellowship awarded by SARAI, Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. I am holding an exhibition of a series of 16 Cinema hall photographs in the FLATFILE Gallery, Chicago in 2008, January.