Tune in to the streets

Well, when was the last time you took a walk? A walk, in the sense of a casual, leisurely stroll. Not a watch-gazing pace, oblivious to the world around. And then, what do you remember of it? Three out of four of us would probably say, ‘nothing’.  
But life? It is happening out there on the streets. No wonder that the street is often an irresistible muse of many photographers. Street photography has a reality bite embedded in it. It has ingredients of drama, of hidden meanings, new glances, metaphor value, and sometimes, plain humour.
In their own way, serious photographers break our apathy to the life happening on the streets. Forget expensive abstract art works, or richly textured paintings celebrating real life; just step out and look around, photographs by people like Leena Kejriwal and Ajay Rajgaria seem to say. They have chosen to work with colour.
The two didn’t exactly collaborate on this, but both of them have frozen beautiful bits of everyday street life; the beautiful, the texturally rich, the funny, the abstract, the mysterious and the evocative. No pretensions, no names, no elaborate framing, the 20" by 30" images hit you directly. Seeing these images, you begin wondering: Is the world around really so spectacular?
Though Leena has shot these images in hometown Kolkata, these could be true of any city, any place, she says. “I used to be quite preoccupied with the constant flashes of beauty in the reality of life… life on the streets,” she shares. Since then, she has evolved to enquire into the when’s and why’s of the scene.
Leena also attempts to convey through these photographs that the journey is equally if not more important than the destination. Currently working as the principal photographer for a book based on Shiva in Mumbai conceptualised by Rajiv Sethi of the Asian Heritage Foundation besides a book on quaint cottage industries in villages around Calcutta, Leena happens to be a licentiate member of the British Institute of Professional Photography (BIPP) besides the Photographers Guild of India (PGI).
Ajay Rajgaria sees himself as a photographer who presents the unusual from the usual. Take this simple and straightforward shot of his: A direct, plain shot of a section of the wall and a freshly painted door. Here, his focus has created a wonderful abstract image of the ‘scene’. The freshly painted bright blue door and faded peeling wall form two contrasting colour effects. Ajay has framed the image in such a way that the wall and the door share exactly the same area of space each, Ajay’s camera creating a composition effect where none was consciously planned upon by the maker — in this case, the mason and the carpenter.
The fact that the door and wall are still decipherable in the image goes on to assure that this abstract image came from a regular concrete object. Ajay says, “My camera leads the way and it is my instinct that captures a hidden moment in time.” The photographer regards his work as a journey of exploration.  
While Ajay and Leena snap up the extraordinariness in the every day happenings and settings of streets, photographers like Vinoth Vijayaraghavan and Yannick Cormier freeze a docudrama sense of street life. In fact, these two photographers have gone on to form Trikaya Photos, as a platform for photographers to express their individual vision in a journalistic way. This agency functions like a cooperative. It’s an association of photographers who have the liberty of choosing their subjects and the way of approaching them.
While they don’t believe in compromising their artistic integrity for the demands of the marketplace, they are open to taking up projects that interest them. They believe that being deeply involved with the subject matter on at hand is the key to producing work of enduring value. Their black and white frames of reality explore issues confronting both urbane cities and rustic villages.