Photography is made possible by movement. What I am specifically referring to here is the kind of photography where one saunters, strolls, treks, marches, however you prefer doing it; the kind that demands at the very least two of our senses—seeing and hearing—as guiding beacons for the photograph that is awaiting us. What is also awakened are our olfactory and auditory senses, that like our vision and hearing, guide us towards our destination. All of this is made possible because of our ability to walk.
“For every walk is a sort of crusade,” preached Henry David Thoreau, who was a naturalist, essayist, poet and philosopher. He, however, took a great liking for the art of sauntering rather than walking. “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of walking, that, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the world from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere, for this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.” By Thoreau’s summation, many of us have been turned into vagrants today, against our will. Because walking, the way Thoreau had envisioned it, could potentially kill us.
With the second wave of COVID-19 hitting India earlier this year, many of us have been forced to, once again, recede to the confines of our homes. Unlike the uncertainty that surrounded the virus last year, where the very idea of stepping out seemed like a life or death situation, this time around, with more information at our disposal, we at least know what we’re fighting against. A grocery trip isn’t as terrifying, but with the rising death tolls caused by the new strain of the virus, it means making each walk count.
Last year, portrait sessions through online video calls was all the rage. It wasn’t that this possibility did not exist before. After all, the internet has always been an open virtual playground where one can visit anyone, anywhere, and at any given moment. However, with restrictions imposed on our physical movement, the interweb became the only gateway to start a kind of documentation that for the very first time required the subject to be as well versed with the process of image-making as the photographer. I’m not just talking about portraitists here, but even street and documentary photographers who recognised the brimming possibilities for creativity. It ran its course though, very quickly too. It had to. Because photography has always been deeply rooted in physical and spiritual intimacy that no screen or technology can ever surpass.
The photographers who suffered the most were perhaps those who couldn’t adapt albeit temporarily to this new way of image-making. I’m specifically referring to those whose photographs heavily rely on the discovery that is made possible through the process of walking. But it’s not just the discovery of a chance moment that walking makes attainable. Walking induces a conversation that traverses far beyond the action of picturemaking. This conversation isn’t just about what or where the next picture is going to be but also the accompanying subliminal ideas and realisations that are planted soon after a photograph is made. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit writes, “When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains.”
Photograph by Conchita Fernandes; Photograph on the wall by Jagdish Agarwal
I cannot fathom the loss we’re all experiencing because of our inability to walk and explore. Once again, Solnit sums it up quite perfectly when she writes, “Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use… Time spent there is not work time, yet without that time, the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.”
For the few of us who do have the luxury of living in open spaces—one’s own backyard or a sprawling common garden—walking is still attainable, although it doesn’t come close to the sauntering that Thoreau was so fond of, into alleyways that are constantly evolving with smells, sounds, colour and movement. However, the bitter truth is that many of us are residents of apartments. Spacious or cramped, there’s only so much walking that one can do across the breadth of one’s home. I’ve done it myself—one time, over two thousand steps at a stretch (an app told me so). I don’t walk though, I pace, mostly late into the night, in the dark, with music playing in the background, absorbed in its words and rhythms. It’s not often that I have the urge of making pictures in such times. But on the rare occasion, I do reach out for my phone. Not all such attempts amount to satisfactory results. But I believe that these attempts were made possible by way of placing one foot in front of the other and continuing to do so until an idea germinates. It is all we can do for now within the margins of our homes. So, walk, pace, drift, in light or in darkness. Never underestimate the power of movement. The sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll realise how familiarity breeds the unknown and peculiar.
This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Better Photography.