Summary: In this photo story, Artohus explores how places change over the course of time and sometimes become unrecognisable from what they had been previously. This collection of photographs depicts an area in Kolkata that has been affected by this unalterable mutation of civilisation. Sadly, the place as you see in the photographs exists no more.
Some people say that photographs are a lie since what they depict is not always what we see. I partly agree with the statement. When you see a photograph, you can interpret anything of the moment it depicts, which, sometimes, may be quite contrary to reality. One more reason why I agree is also because of the fact that photographs portray a moment that doesn’t exist anymore. The only proof of the moment lies either in your memory or in the photograph itself or both. In this sense, photographs perhaps capture the ephemeral moments of life.
While browsing through my collection of photographs a few days ago, I came across an astonishing album. They were of a jheel (lake) in Kolkata I used to frequent as an adolescent. The photographs were taken with my first camera, which I had received as a gift from my mother.
It was during my college days. I used to go for these morning cycle rides to an area near my home, near a major thoroughfare in Kolkata. At that point in time, the area was still developing so there used to be vast spaces of empty land. I had discovered the jheel there. From then on, cycling to the jheel had become my daily routine. I had gotten acquainted with the daily life around the area — local people washing clothes, bathing, praying, taking their morning walk or simply strolling, stray dogs prancing around with their latest catch from the lake or just lazing in the midday sun. Sometimes I would take my cycle up an overbridge and watch the morning train pass by below. Somedays I would take my camera along and try to capture the flow of daily life at the jheel.
While the recollection of those days is rewarding, the realisation that the place doesn't exist as it used to anymore is heartbreaking. The entire area was turned into a paid park frequented by lovebirds after dark. It was illuminated with several artificial lights and was always crowded with people.
From a serene and simple haven, it had turned into this modern, money-minded meeting place for urban inhabitants. No more morning walkers would be seen walking by the pristine jheel. Most of the local residents had been evicted to retain the urban sanctity of the place.
I don’t know which is worse: the fact that another peaceful natural space in the city turned into an urban jungle or that my secret little place to cycle to in the morning ceased to exist.
Here are a collection of photographs that depict the jheel as it was before the cruel hand of modernity altered it.
