Personal Calcutta December 

The Coffee House, College Street, the Howrah train, the Hooghly River, old Calcutta homes – these are images from a rather personal experience of ‘the city’. But photographs tend to acquire their own fluid contexts – new meanings subsequently becoming more than their sum. Documentary photographers claim with certitude the ‘relevance’ of an image. In fact, the frame of the image exists only for the camera and, hence, the photograph ignores the continuity of circumstance. In so doing it necessarily acquires a new context, largely different from what it claims to represent.

Calcutta offers the opposite of optical boredom. Its chaotic streets, the struggle for subsistence is everywhere, and provides potent imagery for any photographer accustomed to an ordered public life. The city has thus become a trap for many photographers, documentary and journalists alike. 

As a young photographer in Calcutta, I admit to having shot many Calcutta clichés – Kumartuli (Potters’ town), the Ganga ghats, the old alleys of north Calcutta. However, intimacy with and fondness for one’s own city dispel any hint of exoticism. The more I looked at other people’s images of the city, the more I decided to move away from such immediately identifiable tropes. The accompanying photographs are intuitive, a tad accidental, and hence distinct from their immediate circumstances.

~ Manish Golder is a young entrepreneur and photographer from Kolkata. An engineer and journalist by training, he runs a film production house. His first film is under production.