you need to peel the layers on art
How much effort do you put into your Instagram profile? Check the caption. Check the final edit. Go back and look at the 35 iterations of the image. Fret over obsessive minor details. Make sure you tag the right people, use the right tags. Everything to get some level of perfection...but was perfection the goal?
In this series I talk to photographers and artists and go behind the scenes of what the final version of a picture looks like.
First up, we have Madhav Goyal, photographer, founder/producer of Portbox (Portfolio Showcase)
My name is Madhav Goyal. I rest deep with a few worlds within art, although, my primary medium of artistic expression remains photography. I have been photographing for 10 years now, and through these years, although I may not have created abundant photographs, I have remained one with photography - I feel like photography is a master-medium for about anyone but it's also a medium for artists who have almost forgotten to paint.
There's a photograph I took of a friend of mine while we were grabbing a cup of coffee. Although I didn't direct her much, I do remember telling her to look towards the candle as if she was waiting for someone. Not even waiting, as if she was tired of waiting. I do not associate that emotion of waiting with this photograph anymore, for me, there's more to it.
One of the rejected photos from the shoot. The figure and the negative space take up equal portions of the frame here, leaving the viewer to figure out which is more important. This creates a slight unease. For the same reason why photos composed with the subject in the centre don't quite work.
If you study it, the frame has the following: a girl sitting inside a cafe, there are windows but we are never able to determine exactly where she is positioned, there's a candle in front of her, the cutlery remains untouched and the chair across from her remains empty.
The final image, and more of the thoughts behind the shoot are continued further on our blog, since newsletters are, well, too short to hold all of the aesthetics we wanna share.
Please click here to read all of it.