about this blog

This blog has been writing about and photographing bazaars. So, many of the posts are about experiences in the bazaars in Kerala, in Chennai and in Vizag. Its at the moment just fascinated with this part of our living heritage.

In the month of April, the blog has focused on how in India, Art is a way of life and that one does see this in our Bazaars everyday. In this april section and also in a few posts in the end of March, bazaars were seen not only as spaces for everyday but as creations of the people to whom they belong to. Art is seen for a while not as a "representation" of the real world but as a "way of seeing" that is photographed for that moment in time. The creation continues to be where it always was.

In May 2007, the blog will go back to the bazaars as a spatial experience, since this research must go on. There are for now, thoughts that belong to the bazaar, which are here at INDIAN BAZAARS and those that belong to experiencing architecture, experiencing life which are in the blog a way of seeing

Colours of a culture

spice art

Light in the Scrapyard

“The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes, the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.”

- John Berger

In his book ‘Ways of Seeing’, John Berger went on to illustrate what happens when a painting is shown on a television screen and how this painting then enters each viewer’s house. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting.

It is interesting to see what happens when something real is captured for that moment on a digital camera. It is a digitised image that is “loaded” onto your computer and that can appear simultaneously on a million computers when put into a blog or into a website. Now, you not only see this image as you did earlier on a television screen and begin to interpret it in your mind, each differently. But, you also begin to exchange these interpretations. You begin to exchange other images that remind you of this image, or meanings that generate other images.

Today, the camera has not only made something from the real world reproducible many times over, but it has allowed this reproduction and its original meaning to be discovered on “the net” or to be “googled”