Nilanjana Bhattacharjee is a gender and development practitioner who brings together ethnography, photography and storytelling in working with lived experiences. Working towards integrating visual storytelling with urban development interventions, she is slowly building a space that melts urban studies, anthropology, visual arts and storytelling to preserve the personhood of communities and histories. Based out of Delhi, her textual and visual documentation work revolves around gendered identity politics, the routes and everyday reality of her Bengali joint family, urban spaces and how they are culturally and emotionally made.
Bhattacharjee will someday become a full-time storyteller but for now, she hunts for stories through her work and play and tells them in the form of photographs, poetry and prose.
Instagram: nilanjanaaa
Dear Nilanjana, Thank you for accepting our invitation and sharing your thoughts with us. Dear Readers, our conversation with Nilanjana and her insightful responses are included below.
Could you please provide us with an overview of your practice and the themes on which you are currently or have previously worked?
I realized my practice in a very sudden way – my language experienced an arbitrary shift of medium from poetry and prose to photographs, a little over five years ago when I began working in the development sector. While I always held an affinity for photographing, it was then that I felt the medium of visual arts begin to intersperse my (personal and professional) expression in a very intentional way. Coming from a 14-member joint Probashi Bengali family raised my practice while working in the development and policy space groomed it. Coming from a family so full of people, histories, and objects saturated my life with stories, odd idiosyncrasies, sounds, smells and tastes and the routes and realities of my joint family became a significant theme of my visual documentation and textual narrative. Combined with my research focus on gender and urbanization as a development practitioner, a very natural extension of the themes of my practice became looking at how the city beyond our gate interacted with the various floors of my home (chronologically divided by age groups and thus levels of ‘modernization’ and urbanization). My practice morphed into trying to understand and document how cities ‘become’ – thus encompassing urban subjectivities of people, cultures, behaviours, and textures that make a city come alive (in its coherence and contradictions). These themes continue to be the dominant stories of my photo making, while the pandemic induced a new practice of documenting the self as a theme I slowly gathered to gauge my own ‘becoming'.
What is it you want to express with your photographs, and how do you manage to do that?
Really, in essence, making a photograph for me is dictated by a feeling. A feeling sparks the need to speak to it, and the inability to really have a language to describe the feeling is what is mended by the ability of visual documentation. The wonderfulness of being dictated by a feeling is that it is non-tangible, thus its translation into a photograph remains an ode to the ‘becoming’ of something. Whether that’s the city, a person, or a situation –what I always feel when I make a photograph is that the moment is just at the cusp of fruition, that it is just about to become. And so even if a viewer may not view a photograph I made as incomplete or with something amiss, what I always try to leave behind in a photograph is the reminder that the ‘scene’ you see is just after what was and what became; you are privy to a single moment of its existence, which is a humbling reminder to how undone we all remain.
As someone who comes from a different professional background, how do you integrate your professional knowledge into photography and vice versa?
I come from an academic and professional background of participatory research and development – the fundamental premise of which is storytelling that is inclusive of all ways of seeing something. I have been deeply fortunate to work in projects dedicated to community mobilization for equitable access (to rights, entitlements, services, citizenship, etc.). This meant working in different cities and communities, learning how culture (and thus ways of seeing) is so foundational to who you become to the city, and who the city becomes to you. How could I not integrate these stories into the photographs I made? They just became another way of talking about my work, and this practice in turn fed the ways in which I chose to narrate my visual documentation of the personal – which can never help but be political, for it always borrows so many ways of seeing from the world outside.
A narrative report is an efficient way of telling the story of a project to a funding donor. A visual journal is far more effective in speaking with communities, without whom your project’s journey holds no true purpose.
The pandemic affected everyone in some way. How do you think it has influenced your work?
I wish I had a more original answer to this but the truth is, like most people, the pandemic affected my practice to look inwards. Bask in (and feel safe in) stillness. The practical limitations of staying home meant a drastic drop in my interaction with the city – and the isolation led me to really look at myself, my body, the body of my home, its objects and the environment. It extended my practice to self-portraits, a format I had interacted with very little in the past. The self-portraits initially felt like they were aspiring prayers of who I wanted to become – light, joyous, sharp with flavour, a reckless hope. Eventually, though, they became lighter in another sense – stiller, calmer, sadder, a careful hope. I am both people, aren’t we all? But the pandemic asked the admittance of the same in my practice in a way life before had not.
What challenges do you face as a visual artist? How do you deal with them?
I think the most significant challenge I face is trying to categorise myself as a visual artist at all. I photograph, but I also write. I write, but I also collage. I make a collage but I also dance. I dance but I also sing. I sing but I also absorb. And so on... There are so many formats and mediums that come together that actually inspire any creation, and I think I have found the sharp dividers between development work, media, communication, journalism, writing, visual arts, etc. rather limiting to what I could make or contribute to. What I create is interdisciplinary – an amalgamation of my practice, profession, my research interests, emotions and intuition and different skill sets. Sometimes this melange of methods and formats falls short in responding to the opportunities out there because I am unable (or perhaps scared?) to give one primary language to it.
Furthermore, my visual documentation’s primary tool is my phone camera. This is an extension of my practice as a participatory development practitioner – to use tools of knowledge creation that are more equitable than others. More people in India have mobile phones than they have access to basic services, making it (not barring irony) a more inclusive ‘tool’ than a DSLR. However, this also means that a photograph I make on my phone will not be as large a file as one shot on the DSLR, deterring physically large publications and instÃgate other technical limitations. I also edit on my phone and hold no expertise in sophisticated editing software. While I know that doesn’t define me or deter me as a visual artist, it does make me feel less sure of myself as an ‘artist’ when the loyal friend of imposter syndrome pays a visit. I haven’t done much to change it, and that must mean it doesn’t make a huge difference to my practice, and somehow that is comforting (for now).
How important is writing in expressing your visual work? How do you believe one can improve their writing abilities?
As far as writing in expressing visual work goes… one is the skin, the other is the bone. One cannot be (alive) without the other.
In terms of improving one’s writing abilities – what I have found helpful is to read. Read more and more and more. Different kinds of texts, all kinds of texts. Reading (and finding) different voices and writing styles have a weird way of helping you get closer to your own. I also think it helps to write as honestly as you can. When you feel something, write it as how you feel it, not how you think it might sound better. Especially when writing about one’s work, it is your gaze and senses that you want to tell the viewer about – what do you want to say, in what ways does it pinch you, how does it liberate you, what are the examples that you can put to the word here that is unique to your experience or memory?
What does Nilanjana do when she is not making photographs?
She sleeps in late, reads books very (very) slowly, gives more time to a work deliverable than required, sends sudden affectionate texts to loved ones, writes poetry, (and since very recently) makes mini (and bad) illustrations with crayons.
What is the most important lesson you have learned so far? Do you have any final thoughts for us as students of this craft?
Everybody is winging it, including your heroes. Try to laugh about it than let it bury you- life has as many ways of making it go right for you as it does of making it go wrong.
Thank you for reading!!
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