leCERCLE

failed photojournalist. www.akshaymahajan.in

[lecercle1]

Open Call for Images: Open House at Format 2017

Miniclick and Blindboys seek image submissions for their upcoming exhibition for FORMAT 2017.

Open Call for "photography, illustration, graphic design, short stories & poems" on the theme of ‘HOME’.

An installation is envisioned at the FORMAT International Photography Festival and Delhi Photo Festival .‘House of Cards’ - prints of your submissions will be fabricated on to individual giant sheets of corrugated card, each with slots cut into them to allow them to interlock. Visitors over the course of the festival, will be allowed to interlock the images to create a growing, evolving, three-dimensional structural exhibition.

(see link below for details on how to submit)

https://miniclick.co.uk/…/open-call-for-images-open-house-…/

[lecercle1]

Have you Seen “48 Hours with the Cadets of India’s National Defence Academy” by @lecercle1 on https://stampsy.com

[lecercle1]

On an island in the Caribbean, a concrete albatross is a stage for photographed dreams.

[lecercle1]

How Charles Correa, illustrates the blessings of the sky (at Jawahar Kala Kendra)

[lecercle1]

A jungle clearing with moss ridden rocks and prayer flags mark a Tibetan shrine that appears to be older then human memory. The dense boscage at the top of Zido. A local engineer referred to the stones as the fallen wings of Jatayu. A tiny gap between the stones beckons us to the center, it is believed that only the good can pass. Samrat's light frame passes easily, head first not feet. I make hard work of it but I too appear at the other end.An Adi man runs past with a 10 foot log resting on his shoulder. He puts it down, and smiles as he rests on nearby crag. He gestures circles in air, we walk clockwise around the shrine as old women do around gompas. The cicadas hum to the smell of burning incense. (at Tuting, Arunachal Pradesh, India)

[lecercle1]

This was our very customized home as we followed the Siang up to the point it becomes the Tsang Po. Huddled ten to a car we travelled along a never ending river valley, first on the north bank by the side of trees the size of hills and forested hills the size of mountains. Our sometimes adolescent Gurkha drivers drove relentlessly as roads disappeared and turned to gravel, sometimes mud and other times over-flowing streams. Like all journeys we had our soundtrack: Bollywood dance numbers drowning us in their unceasing innuendo, Nepali nonsense rhymes, a smattering of Tibetan pop and local Adi Ballards sung to stolen melodies. We rode till our knees crackled and our backs were sore, stopping to sort chewing tobacco out of pouches, smoking Flake Cigarettes and resting our feet in the waters of flowing streams. Young school teachers flirted, a shotgun wielding hunter hitched a ride to Donbo, and old lady counted her prayer beads a thousands times over. Most times we reached our destinations as the sun rays slanted golden. When we didn't we flagged something down, for everybody stops on a road to place which has one way in and one way out. (at Yingkiong, India)

[lecercle1]

Exercise: Get a painted Backdrop. Set it up on a busy street square in India. Make Portraits.

[lecercle1]

Best in Show* Karan Vaid’s quirky look at Dog Culture in India, Past & Present | Blindboys.org

Karan Vaid's ongoing project Best in Show looks at the modern Indian dog shows: doting owners, tear-jerking moments and mysterious paraphernalia. Take a look : http://blindboys.org/blog/?p=2260

[stampsy]

“Holy Water/The Ganges" by Akshay Mahajan (lecercle1) on Stampsy

[lecercle1]

Cuban Holiday

[lecercle1]

On a visit to Chelsea flower show a few summers ago, a nursery specializing in flowering desert cacti from Dorset. This women made 127 varieties of desert cacti from all over world flower at the same time! Perhaps she's a minor god.

[lecercle1]

[lecercle1]

Since I only leave the 1km radius of my apartment in Delhi these days is to leave Delhi.  I usually sit in the night

[lecercle1]

Kid on IamAmsterdam Sculpture, outside Station Sloterdijk on Flickr.

Kid on IamAmsterdam Sculpture, outside Station Sloterdijk

[lecercle1]

Last days in Arambol, Goa. 2009

[lecercle1]

"Singh struck out in his own direction by using color photography, disparaged at the time, rather than black and white. More than a dozen books followed, each focused on different parts of urban and rural India; the images in this show are drawn from them. The documentary-style vision that emerges is neither sugarcoated, nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient."                          - Holland Cotter, "Raghubir Singh: Retrospective", New York Times, 26 November 2004. It's hard to have an impersonal view on photographing India. Many of my western counterparts seem to travel around the country looking for a peculiar Indian abjection - sometimes even a 'beauty as seen in abjection'. I find it a fundamentally western concept. I'm with Raghubhir Singh on this one - beauty as seen in abjection - which suited neither him nor India, hence he created his own Indian style and aesthetic - "a documentary-style which was neither sugarcoated nor abject, nor controllingly omniscient." On recent trip to Rajasthan, I tried and failed perhaps to channel Raghubhir. The Tata Indica fails as an camera obscura when compared to the ambassador.

Well atleast I've learnt to fall out of love with western abjection and let the story tell itself.

[lecercle1]

City of Water,Directed by Charles M.Correa