Week 11: Portraits Of India's Vanishing Jobs by Surpranav Dash

Monday, September 29, 2014 Ching Lea Yee 0 Comments

For Exercise 3 my topic will be focussed on Vanshing Trades in Singapore, thus I decided to research on photographers who have done simliar works. One of them is Surpranav Dash's Portraits of India's Vanishing Jobs. I think that my works will be closely related to his. I love how the black and white images brings out the mood of solemn, ancesteral, and humbleness of the people in the portraits. look like standard American school portraits. A bit unnatural, with nowhere for the subject to hide. And, like a second grader’s bespectacled, pigtailed class picture, these photos are a record of a fleeting moment that might be impossible to see again.

Always bittersweet, in India these technological coups are usurping traditionally human, analog jobs on an accelerated timeline. "Due to the rapid socioeconomic change in India and the McDonaldization of the Asian sub-continent, we are at this juncture when the modern generation prefers not to follow their ancestral trade practice," says Supranav Dash, a New York-based photographer who grew up in Calcutta, around the street contortionists and snake charmers who roamed public spaces.