Snap Stories – Planned Portrait Shots in Working Environments
Snap Stories is a monthly column I write for a travel magazine. ‘Planned Portrait Shots in Working Environments’ was published in March 2014.
In the past couple of years, I have been slowly trying to photograph people often in a planned setup and keeping them aware of the fact that they are being photographed. The idea of this is to capture the subject in a controlled condition, often in an environment that they belong to. It could be the subject’s place of work, home, outdoors where they usually spend time, with their companions or in any other way in which the images speak a lot about the subject’s way of life. More often than not, it converges into their workplaces. And in a country like ours, workplaces are so diverse that you would never run out of possibilities.
I was recently travelling in Kerala on an assignment, when I had several opportunities to make such portraits in controlled environments. While some of them were planned to suit the ideas in my head, others were photographed with the subject distinctly being aware of me photographing them.
In the first image of this fisherman Jospeh, I asked him to stand in this position and let me photograph him. I wanted to create an image where Joseph stood with a sense of ownership to his work. He was standing on a Chinese fishing net, where he worked. But this position did not allow me to get a complete image of his (rather large) net along with him. Yet, it was important for me to clearly show that he worked on Chinese fishing nets. The solution was to show the line of fishing nets behind him, making it clear that he was standing on one of the nets in the line.
The next photograph is of a worker in a wholesale banana shop in a busy market. I found the bright yellow colours of the bananas around him very attractive. The tungsten light in the room added a glow to the whole place. Making sure all those bananas around him were part of the frame helped portray the environment in which he was working.
The third image from my Kerala tour comes from a Kathakali performance. My work allowed me the privilege of watching and photographing an exclusive performance with just a couple of photographers as audience. The artists performed, clearly aware that almost every move they make is being photographed. We began working well before the performance, staring right from make-up and costumes. Somewhere at the end of this artist’s make-up, where he (in the frame is a gentleman playing a lady’s role) was checking the final appearance, I found this mirror image charming enough for a photograph.