Eye of the storm

Shot in 1995 in Patna, Panjiar felt compelled to include this photograph in the series, though it was out of the time period he had set for the series, due to the sheer audacity with which the man dries his underwear. He encountered this man on the highway as he emerged from bathing at a nearby tube well, drying his essentials while he walked back. Panjiar fell in love with his subject’s air of irreverence, and the pointed swagger he took on when he saw the camera pointed at him—an act of rebellion; (right) The first one in the series was shot in 2003 in Kerala at a dam that is a tourist spot. The statues in it draw on nostalgia of summer holidays with family. “This one was actually commissioned by the government for a tourism campaign,” Panjiar tells us, “There are statues of women in many public spaces, even at wedding pandals, and they are usually very buxom. It’s very odd and they do stand out. It’s like when we show adolescent boys gawking at a bikini-clad woman, she’s always fair-skinned.”

The One tight slap! series of photographs by Prashant Panjiar, contained within his exhibition called Indianism showing at Museum of Goa - arrested our attention. It's largely about the omnipresent male gaze, and the larger series takes its name from Panjiar's book, which is a collection of pictures taken within a span of 10-odd years.

The photograph of a woman bending down to draw kolam, derriere in air as a cardboard cutout of a man stares is a juxtaposition of odd things. Shot at a tea stall in the small town of Thiruvannamalai in 2015, Panjiar informs this moment was emblematic of society's male gaze; Shot in 2022 is the snapshot taken at Sassoon Dock of a lock mangled in the roots of a tree shooting out of a rock wall. It looks like one part of an unfinished story, and the picture next to it tells the rest of the tale. Panjiar says that the lock probably belongs to a hard cart owner who plies his trade nearby by day and secures it at the tree at night; The next image is of a pair of exhausted labourers at Sassoon Dock, sitting limp and askew, as if they have lost control of their limbs from the exhaustion. A key hang from the fingers of one of them. To Panjiar, this spoke so eloquently about the hardships of earning a living in the maximum city, as well as the fact that life itself boils down to a lock and its key

Panjiar was born in 1957, and for most of his career, worked as a photojournalist with newspapers such as The Patriot and India Today, before going on to partner with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The more recent years have been dedicated to abstract photography where the audience is tasked with decoding his still-lifes, "India just has so much colour; we are a very visual people."

Prashant Panjiar

As he takes us through his work, Panjiar says he didn't want to impose a viewpoint or context on the viewer. "These are quirky moments and compositions I found as I crossed the length and breadth of this country," he informs us. "They can mean many things to many people… anything at all." Here are the ones that spoke volumes.