Moments in the Life of Bombay

Cities  | 24 September 2010  | print

Sharookh Mehta’s photographs capture the city’s soul

It’s an easy city to love, a hard one to hate, Mumbai, Bombay, whatever you want to call it. It grates on your nerves one day, and charms you the next. It is irresistible and it is undeniable, and it belongs to every one who comes here. If Delhi is a city of power brokers and their pawns, Bombay is truly a city of its people, resilient against all odds.

Bombay—it’s never going to be Mumbai for me, at least not in the way that really matters, its life and heartbeat—is of course a city built on reclamation. But it is also a city that constantly reclaims itself. People make space for themselves in doorways, alleys and corridors. In a narrow gap between two buildings, someone starts a beauty parlour. Pavements are reclaimed each night. The rich reclaim beaches. The poor reclaim what they can, where they can. It never sleeps.

And it is a city of light. That’s something we often miss, but it’s magical and we all know it well: the transparent clarity of the air after the first rains when, from a high vantage point you can see right across the harbour; occasionally, a strange golden evening light that makes everything look pin sharp. Even the early morning haze of December has its own quality. It’s also unexpected, and full of surprises—familiar places and shapes we don’t notice till one day they startle us: the facades of the MCGM headquarters and CST opposite, the restored buildings at Horniman Circle and Kalaghoda, the old buildings at Kalaghoda. Then there are the fleeting snatches of city life: the light shafting through the riotous colours of feather-dusters carried on a long pole by a vendor, or an itinerant with a frame of brightly coloured pinwheels, the Diwali lanterns on Cadell Road.

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to the photography of Sharookh Mehta. For some time now, he has been quietly documenting the city in his album of photographs called “A Moment in the Life of Mumbai” on Facebook. He adds to the album every now and then. Most of the photographs, certainly the best ones, are in black and white, but all are exquisitely realized. Each one tells a story, or a fragment of a story, and it’s one of the hundreds of daily stories that make our city. Dancers in processions, their energy and noise jumping off the page; a huge crowd streaming down a street; street boys mugging for the camera or playing in water; the arch of clothing and the sparkle of water at a dhobi ghat; the steam rising off a pots and cooking vessels in a small eatery; a fisherman tossing a basket of daily catch to someone—it’s all there, frozen in time, the life of the city captured and preserved.

Mehta’s images echo the work of great photographers of city life: Alfred Steiglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, arguably Walker Evans, and, perhaps most of all, Andreas Feininger’s work of 1940’s New York. Some of his images reach those standards, and there’s no doubting the technical proficiency. Like the work of those photographers, Mehta’s images are not idealized. His subjects are not necessarily beautiful or even lyrical. What Mehta explores is the everyday, the everyman, things that are around us; the ordinary, the plain, the tacky and the sleazy, and in each of these Mehta finds elements of fascination, matters that intrigue. There is no deliberate artiness or contrivance to these images—no odd close-ups or weird angles. It’s what the eye might see, and most of the images appear to be shot with a wide angle or a normal lens. Mehta is not expressing himself in these images, as Steiglitz and others tried to do by exalting the mundane to the level of art.

In the 1940’s Feininger started what can only be called a process of discovering New York. He saw in its growing urban landscape the things big and small that made it what it was, and showed it in its process of transformation. Feininger’s series has large sprawling vistas of the city, but his finest photographs are those that detail the minutiae of daily life in the city.

In her brilliant discourse On Photography, Susan Sontag argued that technological advances have changed photographers and their audiences in several ways, creating a new visual code. She wrote:

“To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified … No moment is more important than any other moment; no person is more interesting than any other person.”

In Mehta’s work, this is flipped from the negative to the positive. Here, every person is equally interesting, regardless of who he or she is, or what he or she is doing. They are of interest for one reason, and that is because they are part of the city. They are the city, and it is a city that Mehta clearly loves and respects. This affection and kindness comes through in every image. Mehta’s images make incandescent the ordinary lives of an extraordinary city.

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos

Shahrook Mehta’s Bombay Photos