In Media Res
Announcements, celebrations, and a meditation on the camera's I.
The abstract artist Ad Reinhardt’s work invokes a satisfying bewilderment. As it should. What’s the point of abstract art if not bewilderment? Let’s leave the sense of wonder to science fiction, the human condition to accountants and poets, and the meaning of life to stand-up comics. Abstract art: bewilder me, with extra MSG please.
In contrast, our deadline for submissions is austere fact, entirely free of art, bemusing or otherwise. TBLM’s submission deadline for submissions is May 31, 2024. We also have a cap of 400 submissions for each of our categories (Fiction, Poetry, Graphic Fiction, Translated Poetry, Translated Fiction) and we’re quite close to maxing out in poetry and fiction submissions. So word to the wise: don’t wait too long. Actually, we’re kinda torn about this. We want great work and you want great work and great work tends to burn through many candles. But then there’s also Sylvia Plath’s opening verse in the Munich Mannequins:
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
So yeah, make the call, comrade. We know it’s tough to know when something’s ready. Good luck.
In other news, we are stoked, chuffed, fizz-whizz’d –in short, happy— to collaborate with the Anantha Poetry Festival for an AMA session: Query the Crow: Poetry, Passion and Publication on 30th May 2024 at 8:30 PM (IST). The poetry editors of The Bombay Literary Magazine will field your questions on the tricky business of submissions, craft, style, and other issues, eternal or evanescent. The event is free and open to all.
We’ll take questions at the session, but get a head start by sending your questions to help@bombaylitmag.com with the subject line: Query the Crow.
Fortnightly Freudenfreude:
We have a collection of short-stories to crow about. Short-story collections are the Victorian orphans of the publishing world. Fortunately, some far-sighted publishers have the gnarly to give ‘em a home and a chance to succeed. Aleph Book Company has just published The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told, the thirteenth volume in its series of short-stories from a given Indian language into English, and edited by none other than A. J. THOMAS., whose translation of one of O. V. Vijayan’s short stories appeared in Issue 57. Kudos to Aleph, and hearty abhinandhanangal to A. J. Thomas!
Colophon: In the City, Every Street Corner is an Untold Story
SIDDHARTH DASGUPTA
Photo credits: Siddharth Dasgupta. All rights reserved.
On a thriving street in a large-ish Indian city of your choice, life unfurls like a manic dose of poetry. Pedestrians speed-walk their way past drooping electric wires, perfectly predictable potholes, and street dogs beside themselves with the frenetic energy of this daily urban drama—barely avoiding one another as they navigate the human cadence of the metropolis. Parades of street hawkers squawk out their daily wares. Tourists gape at the explosions of colour. Schoolchildren rush by, in that whooping-skipping-tumbling rush exclusive to schoolchildren the world over. Everything seems indestructible. Everything seems perfectly, poignantly perishable.
On a corner framed by a traffic signal and a watch repair shop of dubious credentials, a man is oblivious to the brouhaha though. He is a shoeshine man with not the least bit of interest either in shining shoes or the cultivated chaos at his doorstep. He pores over a newspaper, and the newspaper is all that matters. He seems to be memorizing every word, forming opinions on the nation, the world, and whatever lies beyond. The odd misguided customer is shooed away. Who has time for shoes when the world is such an entrancing mess? Of this unnamed human is the photographic essay born.
The photo-essay has been around since photographs have been around. Men and women have always been drawn to the act of documenting the world around them, of gathering fellow humans into personal stories and archival projects. In the shoeshine man, the modern-day city finds its eccentric, vital hook—an object stubborn in its resistance against time; a figure that, for a brief instance in the cosmos, casts the city and the world anew.
As Visual Narratives Editor with The Bombay Literary Magazine, I both seek out and commission photo-essays that can frame our bewildering world in new ways, that carry the whimsy of spontaneity and the potency of truthfulness. This is a harder job than you might imagine.
The democratization of photography is also, frequently, its greatest undoing. “Have phone, will click” has become a mantra for social cultivation, remembrance, uninterrupted Instagram feeds, and ambition in the strange cocktail that is 21st–Century life. I end up rejecting nearly 98% of the submissions that come in via Open Calls and such. The photographs feel lazy, devoid of eye and heart. The words don’t say nearly enough, or worse, say exactly what the photographs are already saying.
But this deluge of photographic and narrative homogeneity also makes it easier to mark out the rare ones, the ones who shift the gaze and tilt the perception, the ones that use uncommon angles and employ beautiful lighting, the ones that gather stories needing to be told—in short, the photo-essays that mean something.
While at its heart, the photographic essay is the art of telling a thematic story through photographs and words, it’s the smaller parts making up the whole that crackle with the unexpectedness of life. The conversations you end up having. The cafés you enter and in which you linger, either for a breather or for the city to reveal something, anything. The photographic accidents—unintentional blur, mellow light leaking in through the upper left. The music of the city. The kindness of strangers. The muscle in empathy.
As a writer who dwells, often and concurrently, in the visual worlds, and in this role as an editor, the pioneering French street photographer and 35 mm exponent, Henri Cartier-Bresson, is never too far from my mind. And it’s the photojournalism savant’s words that come to mind over others, in this meditation on the photo-essay—“I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to ‘trap’ life—to preserve life in the act of living. Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”
And it’s this situation that was in the process of unrolling that forms the glorious heartbeat of the great photographic essays over the decades. There is W. Eugene Smith, a fabled figure in the birth and evolution of the editorial photo-essay, with his celebrated and influential ‘Country Doctor’ essay for Life. There’s Smith again, with his even more lauded ‘Spanish Village’—a searing, moving photographic portrait of life in rural Spain during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco—again, for Life. In contemporary times, Christian Lutz-Vu and Rachel Lowry’s melancholic expedition of ‘Photographing the Mirage of the American Dream in Las Vegas’, for Time. Closer home, Raghu Rai has created a remarkable legacy with his powerful forays into war, human rights violations, ecocide, and the portrait of the Indian as forever-migrant. And it’s hard to erase fashion- and fine-arts–photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta’s legacy in black-and-white—be it his framing of urban women, his powerful documentation of Ladakh, or his everyday vignettes of longing.
But away from the epic and the legendary, there are vast continents of space and freedom for the small and the intimate, for the minutiae of everyday life captured by photojournalists as yet unknown to the world. All that’s vital is film, a DSLR, or even a mobile phone, and the peculiar quality of heart. I’m tempted, again, towards something Cartier-Bresson once said—“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera…” he remarked. “They are made with the eye, heart, and head.”
Back on the thriving street in the large-ish Indian city of your choice, the shoeshine man is nowhere to be seen. Given the oddities of his nomadic existence, he is probably in a different part of town today, no doubt shooing away pesky customers, immersed entirely in news of the world. The thought stings the skin like sudden sunlight on a winter’s morning—If only someone had photographed him. If only someone had told his story.
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Siddharth Dasgupta writes poetry and fiction from lost hometowns. You’ll find his ramblings, meditations, and transgressions on Instagram @citizen.bliss.
hello, is there a link to the AMA session?