Relations - La Verne Kraus Gallery, University of Oregon. Eugene, Oregon. US
(November 2025)
Through a research on Lee Friedlander’s “America by Car” (ref) where the majority of the country is based upon petro culture and aesthetics mostly devoid social interaction but also frames the drivers’ ability and notion of seeing the world, I re-imagined this tendency in the globalized world where I decided to explore and see how it looks to see the world while riding and driving a car. Kolkata being one of the heavily populated and also very well connected commute system in India, this imposition on seeing the city through a car turns to be a “luxury” and also engaging with added “carbon footprint”. Along with this alteration seeing from the right handed driven country the most logical part to constantly view is on the “left” handed side of the car.
While the majority of any “road trip” is based on constant flux of newness and shock of the “mundane” sublime to create and circulate a rhetoric of “American Myth” of romanticizing a land through consumption of the “idea” my work subverts the entire phenomenon as a distant yet engaged voyeuristic act attached to a particular place being “immobile” This particular phenomenon creates a tension between the mobility and immobility in the context of time and its relation to both moving images and still photography. And finally the act becomes an interaction between the “interior” and the “exterior” with a constant mis-recognition of a “surveillance” which is directed from the “photographer’s” point of view which not only records the “everyday” of a dramatic ever-changing city in front of a banal backdrop but also it waits from a photographic point of view of “presentiment”.
To counter-act and reproduce another meaning where the “photographic seeing” (ref.2) comes into being the stage is redirected from the exterior to the interior with a stasis of time I represented an everyday seeing from outside of my apartment to the interior of it.
List of references:
Friedlander, Lee. America by Car. D.A.P./Fraenkel Gallery, 2010. ISBN 10: 1935202073 ISBN 13: 9781935202073. https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/lee-friedlander-america-by-car
B. Girgus, Sam. Beyond Ontology: Levinas and the Ethical Frame in Film. June 2007. Film-Philosophy 11(2):88-107. I (pp 88-91) DOI:10.3366/film.2007.0012