Still Moving Image

Siddhartha Tawadey sees life through a Buddhist lens, where all is movement, all is transience

Siddhartha Tawadey sees life through a Buddhist lens, where all is movement, all is transience

Siddhartha Tawadey quit a career as an investment banker to become a full-time photographer. His latest solo show, Transience: A Photographic Salutation to Impermanency, is a curious collage of photos. His images are snapshots of things, objects and experiences dissolving into one another, in the way one would see things while moving. In one snap one can see an elephant’s foetus in the eye of the viewer, in another a clump of trees captured during a car ride, and one more of a woman’s back in a clearing seen from a distance. It vivifies mobility and stillness. Its strangeness is its USP.

Q The point of this show?

A To capture movement. To show that it is movement that makes things merge and that it can be caught in a photograph that is a still (but moving) object.

Q Why is it called Transience?

A Because it’s about the total impermanence of anything. It’s also to show that a photograph is not a static object. It moves and has the ability to capture movement and nature.

Q You’ve spoken about Buddhism influencing your work. Are you a Buddhist?

A No, I’m not. But I have a great affinity to certain ideas of Buddhism. For instance, the very Buddhist thought that life is in constant transition is something I’ve tried to capture at its very core. Things change as people see them. And people, too, change as they see things.

Q Is there any ‘meaning’ to your photographs? Or, are they plainly abstract?

A That’s up to the viewer. My function is to communicate what I think I’ve captured from nature of some significance to me and convey that to the world. A theme in this show is the chemistry between objects. A sense of them fusing.

Q How much does having been an investment banker feed your work?

A Dedication, focus, discipline. But that’s pretty much all. Otherwise, I don’t think I was made to be a corporate guy.

Transience runs at the Travancore Art Gallery, New Delhi over 12-22 November
 

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