LURU Hangs with… Lens-based Artist Vivek Muthuramalingam

Photography is more than image-making.

In the eerie, blood-red glow of the darkroom at Kanike, his collectively shared artist space in Cooke Town, Vivek Muthuramalingam, a Bengaluru-born lens-based artist, spills his stories of rediscovering photography through analog printing techniques. He recalls a summer in 2013, at a two-month residency hosted by the Goa Centre for Alternative Photography (Goa-CAP), where he “used to go from one beach to another collecting seawater, diluting it to two per cent” to create his salt prints of the poders, or poee bakers of Goa.

Vivek remembers the residency beginning as an exercise in “understanding the historic aspects of photography,” but eventually, it clicked that photography is more than black-and-white and colour; it needs a decent investment in a good camera. He realised that all of these assumptions about the practice of photography weren’t “really true.”  Deeper study of analog printing techniques has exposed him to the truth: “you don’t need to have a negative to make prints, but [you should] still be able to use light to make prints — that’s what photography is about,” he declares emphatically.

After his time in Goa, Vivek, who had grown more and more estranged from his practice, reached a “truce with photography.”

Snapping into the past

Vivek perfectly processed the residency’s objective: to re-ignite in contemporary artists the passion for analog photography — an umbrella term used for all the chemical processes that capture an image, typically on paper, film, or a hard surface. His disillusionment with digital photography has made him “like the fact that there is no perfection” with analog printing techniques; rather, one is “always in for a surprise,” he admits. It has become his philosophy for life: “you can’t have everything under control,” and there will be days “when it just goes terribly out of control.”

While he isn’t set on perfection, he does confess to “sometimes going very technical and trying to get a perfect print.” But then his co-conspirator in analog techniques, Krishanu Chatterjee, brings him back on track by pointing out that his previous prints “had much, much more emotion.”

He reminds us that although one could get boggled by the historical details of these printing techniques, or overwhelmed by the chemicals, ratios, and reactions, “it’s also something about colours and mood.” He speaks about how analog formats like sepia tone, for example, are “so strongly connected with the notion of memories.”  In our time with Vivek, we are introduced to techniques like printing on glass, where “the image is directly formed on a glass panel, so there is no negative — there’s only one [print] that you can make out of it,” and to gum oil technique, which produces “a very charcoalish texture.”

Vivek loves salted paper prints and is presently finessing his grasp on a new cyanotype technique. His rediscovery and rigorous practice of analog techniques has led him to rifle through his own large archive of narrative photography again.  He is working towards “finding the right analog medium for my old photographs,” which he declares has also lent him “an exciting way of looking at my work again.”

It isn’t just his photography practice that is evolving with his application of analogue printing; he also seems to be altering his relationship with the past. He points to his “favourite photograph” of his maternal grandfather standing shirtless in a lake in Thimidi, a village in Andhra Pradesh. Vivek had a difficult relationship with him and would ask him, just as he arrived at his childhood home, “When are you leaving?” But his examination of historical photo printing techniques and family albums has converged, and Vivek has softened towards his grandfather. “Because when you are scanning, you see the photograph really up close, your memories are being refreshed — and suddenly, there’s so much you remember,” he says earnestly.

Through his photography practice, Vivek is looking into his grandfather’s “piercing eyes” for the first time. Follow his practice here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly Luru Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.