Shibu Arakkal did not think twice about naming his photo series Mallaah. “Mallaah is an Arabic word for the movement of a bird’s wings when it flies,” he says. “It is the same movement made by the boatmen when they row the boat. I thought it was incredibly poetic.’’ The photographs were exhibited at Gallery G in Bengaluru from August 14 onwards.
For Arakkal, 43, photographs are what canvases are to a painter. Sometimes he changes the look and feel of the images. After he finished photographing the boatmen, he realised the images were stark and gritty. “They looked ultra-real, with those rich colours,” he recalls. He wanted them to be essentially poetic. What followed was an extensive post-production process. “I spent around 100 hours on each of these images,’’ he says.
A photograph from Mallaah
Driven by an unorthodox philosophy of art, Arakkal often finds himself at loggerheads with people who believe that photography should depict reality accurately. “My photography interprets reality,” he says. “I don’t worry about being accurate or faithful because I am not a photojournalist. My photographs are an artistic expression, a statement of how I feel about a particular subject.’’
The son of eminent artist Yusuf Arakkal, Shibu Arakkal was always surrounded by art. “My dad never taught me about art,” he says. “I have never had a single lesson on art in the traditional way, where my father said: ‘Sit down. I’ll teach you art’. But, as a child, I was always surrounded by artists, filmmakers, writers and poets. There was a subconscious percolation of [their sensibilities].”
A few days ago, Arakkal had a strange dream in which he saw all the photographs in the Mallaah series as paintings done by his father. It shook him. He went to Gallery G the next morning and spent time contemplating the images. “It suddenly hit me that the boatmen looked exactly like figures my father would have drawn. I did not ask them not to smile,” he says, almost as an afterthought. “That is the life they are living.”