City and its people by Siddhartha Mukherjee
This is just the taste of the project that will be published on one of the next issues of our Magazine.
The visual confluence of people and the cities they inhabit forms an inextricable whole in my pursuit of street photography.
Empty cityscapes to me invoke as much a sense of haunting, as people without their surroundings invoke estrangement.
In this project, I try to interweave through a series of double exposures (all on 35mm black and white film) candid street photographs with cityscapes.
Much like reflections, double exposures bring out the interplay of light and shadow in surreal forms that are difficult to conceive and yet played out fluidly through chance, experiment and exploration.
Shooting analogue makes chance a determining factor in how these photographs turn out, while completely bypassing the allure of excessive editing and the pursuit of perfection in overlaying two scenes.
Here I first shot all the portraits, and then a series of random cityscapes (keeping in mind a few general rules I followed in composing the former).
Developing each roll of film brought surprises as well as lessons that I tried to learn for the next series of shots. So far, these photographs have been shot over a month in Hague and Copenhagen, and I will be continuing this project in different cities. I hope it sparks some viewers into connecting more intimately with their city and its people.