The Baker and his Sweets
Mandawa, Rajasthan, India 2004 : A young man arranges cookies for display in his shop. He seems engrossed in his work, but I’m betting he is “miles away”. I don’t think he looked up as I photographed him.
I like this kind of photo. There is ‘gesture’ here. Gesture is a word I learned yesterday from an online class taught by Jay Maisel on KelbyTraining. Jay says a building can have ‘gesture’. I think it means that at that moment, the light, the color, the action around the building (maybe just the way the wind blows a tree branch across a doorway) lends it an ambiance or a sense of something more than just the structure. Somehow even an inanimate structure can convey emotion.
The ability to see ‘gesture’ comes with experience: from looking at our photos and trying to figure out why they don’t say what we felt. With practice we are able to see what makes our heart urge us to shoot and, with practice, we learn to use our camera to show others that feeling.
The intense blue paint, the yellow of the jellabies, the man’s posture with his long, lean body folded into an origami sculpture called me to take the shot. And then there is his lunch in a tiffin container. (The little can-thing on the bench, in the left foreground.) Tiffin containers have gesture. They say India.
There is some good geometry here as well. You can make triangles by drawing a line from the tray of jellabies to the man’s head or to the bucket on his left and to the dish pan set on the barrel in the doorway. To be honest, I didn’t notice the geometry until I had the slide on my light table. You don’t have to be conscious of geometry. Your unconscious mind tells you what to do. That is why you practice.