April 26, 2012, 3:28 AM
In ‘The Commuters,’ a Photographer Chronicles Mumbai’s Working Class
By NEHA THIRANI
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
A composite of images from Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s exhibit, “The
Commuters,” up from April 17-29 at The Curator’s Gallery in Mumbai.
You stare out of the window, you fiddle with your phone, you nod your
head along to music, you block out the sounds and presence of people
pressed against you, and you try to pass the time during another dreary
morning commute in Mumbai’s local trains. It was out of this boredom
that photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri’s latest show “The Commuters” was
born.
The show, which is on at the Curators’ Gallery of the Chhatrapati
Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly Prince of Wales Museum),
is a series of portraits that attempts to give a face to the thousands
of people who commute long hours each day in Mumbai’s local train. He
has also self-published a book with 98 images of commuters with a
foreword by author Jerry Pinto. Mr. Chaudhuri says the idea for the
show was largely an outcome of the tediousness of commuting an hour to
work, which he has done almost every day since 2001.
For Mr. Chaudhuri, the train journey became a space for introspection
where he would mull over the day’s work and his ongoing projects. “I
was thinking about how you would do a portrait of the working class
which is by definition faceless,” Mr. Chaudhuri said. “And I realized
that I was sitting there surrounded by people who got up each day,
traveled for over an hour, put in another day of work and somehow that
affects the GDP (gross domestic product) in a big way or small; they
are the working class.”
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
A subject photographed in a Mumbai suburban train for “The Commuters”
series.
His desire to create a portrait of the working classes in Mumbai, the
city formerly known as Bombay, was combined with a growing interest in
the photographic mug shot. On a recent visit to Cambodia, the
photographs of prisoners in the notorious Tuol Sleng, the notorious
Khmer Rouge prison, struck a chord with the photographer. He decided to
use the aesthetic framework of the mug shot to capture the experience
of commuting inherent to modern urban life.
Chirodeep Chaudhuri
An old man photographed while traveling in a Mumbai train.
Each day for two years, Mr. Chaudhuri made portraits of the men who
traveled with him on the 10:03 a.m. local train from Thane to
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in the first class men’s compartment. “I
could only photograph the man who happened to be sitting in front of
me,” he said. “Even if I saw another guy sitting in the corner with a
more interesting face, I wasn’t allowed to change my seat.”
On most occasions, his subjects were not even aware they were being
photographed. “No one ever took it very seriously or objected,” said
Mr. Chaudhury, who would pretend he was fiddling with his camera like
people did with their cell phones. “During a train commute usually no
one tries to talk to people sitting near them. In Bombay if you can
block off people for a while you are relieved.”
To capture the sense of the subtle monotony integral to the daily
commute, Mr. Chaudhuri chose to do the series in black and white. “All
of us packed into the train became this large ball of flesh,” said the
photographer. “The colors become layers of information which I didn’t
think were important for the narrative.”
In the space of imposed intimacy that the train compartment created,
Chirodeep Chaudhuri captured his fellow passengers’ small quirks. There
are men who are fiddling with their headphones, some staring vacantly
out of the window, a couple peering suspiciously into the lens itself,
some nodding off to sleep with soporific yawns and a series of men
engrossed by their cell phones – sometimes sporting two at a time. One
that stands out is a man wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I’m part of the
problem.” The show features 56 of Mr. Chaudhuri’s 800 photographs. Mr.
Chaudhuri continues to take photographs of commuters on his daily
journey.
Mr. Chaudhuri, 38, has worked as a photographer and photojournalist
since the early 1990s in Mumbai. He is currently national photo editor
of Time Out India. A self-taught photographer, Mr. Chaudhuri says he
began his relationship with the camera by accident on a commute home.
Browsing through the pavement bookstalls in Mumbai’s Flora Fountain
area, one afternoon when he was in college, he came across a copy of
Life magazine. “In the next one and a half hours it took to get home, I
became a huge fan of photography,” he said.
Having grown up in Mumbai, Mr. Chaudhuri considers the city his primary
muse. He has documented the city and its transformations for more than
18 years, including buildings in Mumbai with clocks on them (he found
51), the Western waterfronts of Mumbai, the average citizen’s sense of
enterprise (represented by paid telephone that are ubiquitous in small
storefronts), the cities’ Muslim neighborhoods and the lewd graffiti in
suburban trains.
Mr. Chaudhuri is not alone in his attempt to capture the experience of
commuting, of course. A long line of photographers have documented the
rides on trains and subways across the world’s cities. In 2005, Travis
Ruse, a photographer based in New York carried out a yearlong
documentary project of the city’s commuters. American photographer
Walker Evans did a series of subway portraits back in the late 1930s,
using a camera hidden in his jacket. Bruce Davidson photographed New
York’s subway system in the 1980s and German photographer Wolfgang
Tillmans, who photographed commuters in London’s underground.
‘The Commuters’ will be on at The Curator’s Gallery, The Prince of
Wales Museum till 29 April, 2012
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