Shakshi Kumar’s photographs deal with identity issues and lack of values. She chats with Kunal Singh
What do you do when you meet a person for the first timeIJ You talk, exchange greetings and sometimes you are enthralled by the ideas and thoughts they share. Twenty-year-old Shakshi Kumar is one such person who can impress you easily with her ideas. She is a medical student from Chandigarh, who attends her college at weekdays and expresses herself through her photographs at weekends. Her photographs are inspired by the chaotic bounds of the human community which has diverted from what she thinks is the right path. Her photographs begin on a melancholic note and end with a doleful tone.
Inspired by books like A Thousand Splendid Suns and other Afghan writings, she finds pleasure in taking people’s pictures and capturing their emotions. She explains, “Everything we say or do is a combination of our personal experience. I believe every individual is unique in his or her own special way, we just have to find our true identity in this crazy world. The community is bound by so many insignificant things which restrict us from realising our own selves. Humans have forgotten what they need at very basic level to survive each day. The photographs I take have a radical sense in them, something that might convince a person to think about other things for once, go back to the start and seek for the human soul in a moving, living body. I believe humans are the most senseless, selfish creatures on earth. They are arrogant, ungrateful and dependent creatures and frankly, when I think about future, it scares me. I would like to make people think and look beyond the obvious through my photographs.”
Her photograph Free Spirit depicts a corporate man who is bound by certain circles of the community yet looks up in the sky embedded with a hundred flying pigeons. The thought behind the picture, she says is that “I hate corporate life. It sucks the life out of humans. We lie, we step on other human souls just to reach a little higher ground. People do inhuman acts and are so cool about it. I guess I want to change that through my chosen way of expression, that is photography.”
She uses a Cannon Mk3, which is a 22.3 megapixel full-frame CEMOS digital single lens professional camera, for her photos and she previously owned a Nikon D3100. “I started with self portraits which people loved and couldn’t get enough of. My current sense of photography was moulded by an event when I was in a hostel. A friend of mine had a defect in her upper lip and she hated herself for that. I asked her if I could take some pictures of her and they turned out to be great. I realised that photography is not about an expensive camera or beautiful subjects. It is about pointing the lens at the right thing at the right time. The camera does not decide between good photos and bad ones, photography, like any other way of self expression, is about knowing what you want and combining it with patience, determination and hard work for a desired output.”
Her work was exhibited as Dream Often at DlF Promenade. Her vision behind the exhibition revolves around how people are strangling nature. “We would have to find a way around nature rather than through it. The destructive nature of humans cannot be eradicated right away and if not controlled in time, it will most definitely consume us.”
She plans to go back to what inspired her for the first time and shoot vivid self-portraits. The theme of her new project would revolve around mood swings.