the lighter aspects of haunting

Photo Essay by Anuja Dutta

Home.

Tethered to a location, a space, an interior – home is almost always irrevocably marked by temporal shifts.

Einstein’s famous theory on space-time is perhaps best captured by our cultural fascination with ‘haunted houses’. A typical architectural space with its own understanding of time and, some might even argue, physics. My photographs are about how we see and perceive the most banal surroundings. About the everyday, which constitutes ‘home’ as a perpetually haunted space; Understanding haunting as a method – a practice – of seeing our environment in a particular light.

Haunting and illumination have always been troubled bedfellows.

Light cannot exist without casting a shadow; it obscures as much as it reveals. While the rationale of haunting has always been about ‘bringing to light’ what remains repressed, any exercise in following light can lead us into eerie domains of the everyday, turning a more familiar visual narrative into something strange. All sources of light, cosmic, terrestrial, rural, or urban, will deliver its stranger cousin.

A common misconception about the absence of light – and by extension, haunting – is that it instills a sense of fear or dread in its witnesses. But the sensory experiences gathered by witnessing a haunted scape or image surpasses stereotypical responses of fear and can often leave us with a heightened sense of stupor. The feeling is almost akin to a sense of peace, quite the opposite of fear induced turmoil. As per Bengali belief systems, afternoons and nights are most conducive for haunting. This means that the safe boundaries of home are most susceptible to these temporal intrusions.

As a documentation of space, of everyday, the visual narratives which emerged closest to haunting are thus, invariably, marked by similar passages in time, coinciding with traditional beliefs. Albeit, unknowingly.

Volume 09

clay | chlorophyll | crimson

Grass is green where you water it. LC’s words float along over Misch’s guitar. It’s a phrase that feels so obvious, and I’m sure those who tend to gardens know this more than most, but it seems to land more than before. The impact noticeable, memorable, echoing through my being. Perhaps we’re ingrained to think it’s greener elsewhere. This patch is the problem and not whether we’re watering it. The key is in the watering. How we go about this practice is what defines our patch of grass. No matter where we go, our patch is, perhaps, the same. Some attributes and characteristics have been changed but the essence is the same: Us.

Stepping into Volume 09 of imprint, marks our third year. I am learning that this patch of green that we have been tending to for the last several years will mould, shift, and sculpt. This depends on how we water it and allow it to take its own shape. It has already happened in wonderfully unexpected ways. There is only so much structure or shape we can predetermine. Beyond that, it will absorb what it needs and reject all that is unnecessary. And perhaps, in this practice, we are changed. Our grass is watered as we water that of our writing, our image making, our practice, our magazine.

From light to dark, rigid to supple, new to old, there is so much in between that is bright and vibrant and unexpected. The practice of our magazine has focused on being open to what we receive; being open to deeply listening to what is shared; being open to work taking us to new journeys. This volume, and this year, will be no different. We will continue tending to it as we have done, learning along the way, from past seasons and present ones.

And yet, I know it will be entirely different.
But still.
It will be watered.