February 28, 2004

In this age of perpetual invasion of images, the public is turning immune to the impact of the visuals offered to them on an instant basis and in abundance. Amid all this, only some artists possess the ability to create works of originality and aesthetic sophistication. Azmat Kamal is one of them, says Iram Zia

Azmat Kamal is a photographer who also paints and makes works in the mixed media. Sensitivity of surfaces and imaginative composition appear as the distinct features in all of his works. Recently he exhibited his photographs at Rohtas-II in Lahore. The show, his first-ever solo exhibition, was well received; his next exhibition of mixed media works will be held at the Alliance Francaise, Lahore. Between the two exhibitions, Azmat Kamal talked about his work and ideas.

Asked if photography was a suitable medium for his ideas, Kamal responded by saying, “What is more suitable to my expression and ideas depends on what my ideas are at a given time.” He said he never took up photography at the expense of painting, a fact that is apparent in his mixed media exhibition too. “I seem to have gone opposite to what Picasso once said, that ‘there are two professions whose practitioners are never satisfied with what they do: every dentist would like to be a doctor and every photographer would like to be a painter.’”

Talking about the qualities and characteristics which elevate a photograph to a work of art, Kamal said, “a photographed image — still and moving — is so extensively employed that it has become an integral part of our everyday life. But this is also wherein lies the real challenge to produce images of ‘expressive’ quality. For a photograph to be really good, the camera has to be an eye in the head of a poet. Unfortunately, while good photographers are as rare as good poets, bad photographers outnumber bad poets by thousands.

“The qualities and characteristics that transform an image into a piece of art are drawn on three prerequisites: one, an ability to see in terms of photography; two, the desire to experiment; and three, editorial integrity and judgment. After one has got hold on these, good image making is like sleepwalking of the prepared mind.”

Kamal elaborated that “an ability to see in terms of photography” meant an awareness of everything that determined the graphic appearance of a picture. He said that the greatest misconception about photography was the saying that ‘the camera does not lie’. “If anything the opposite is true: I can enumerate a dozen camera lies. That is when how the eye sees and what the camera records turn out to be so different. The only reality a photograph conforms to is that of being a photograph: it is, after all, an abstraction of the real world in two dimensions, divested of all other sense impressions (sounds, smells, taste, touch) that augment the visual impression of what we see.

“To see in terms of photography, a good photographer must mute all these senses except sight. And in seeing a subject, see it as an abstraction consisting of lines and forms, colour, light and darkness — all as elements of a potential design.”

This he said depended on the eye of the mind: imagination. Imagining how a subject can be isolated from its surroundings, characterized, condensed and finally presented in the most graphically effective form. If the design (often called ‘composition’) is weak, the picture falls apart.

When asked whether the picturesque quality of a view was a random discovery or a conscious decision on his part, Kamal said he trusted his instincts as opposed to questioning his choice of the subject at hand, assuming that the ‘things’ he photographed had value for that reason alone. “There are no less or more photogenic subjects, only latent designs everywhere to be discovered. Like Susan Sontag aptly sums up, ‘the painter constructs, the photographer discloses.’ But, of course, out of the clutter out there, I make conscious choices. My favourite challenge is to capture the elegance in the commonplace and the ordinary. Enhanced and abstracted by light and shadow, it is that which then becomes extraordinary for me.”

Kamal says that his display print size is never predetermined. He experiments a lot, working with slide-film and getting a fair idea of the appropriate scale for a given image by projection by the end of the exercise. “Quite often, what looks good as an 8x10 print does not become great at 20x24. In fact, it may become disappointing. Content and mood of the image are my determinants for the presentation size.”

Referring to his techniques and methods over the 40 years, he said there had been a lot of change. He started off with pictorial (visual cliches now) vistas, romantic sunsets, soft-focus portraits, flowers and close-ups. Then, in the early ’80s, he got enthralled by the transparency film, and was driven to do a lot of montage and sandwiches — those were pre-Photoshop days — to create semi-abstract images for projection. Now his guiding principle for the kind of imagery he desire is “out of the clutter find simplicity.

“I now go after discovering relationships out there between things. Through framing, I reduce information, order elements and make design choices for creating a tension between the familiar and the mysterious. To this end, my other in-camera devices are limited latitude of the transparency film, spot mastering and depth of field preview.”

Referring to his recent work, Kamal said that he had employed a hybrid approach: “I am resolutely enamoured of the transparency film, but past the camera, I am all for the digital revolution.” He said that in his current exhibition achieving the print quality would not have been possible without digital printing technology.

Looking at his recent exhibition, there seems to be an absence of human presence. Asked if this was deliberate, Kamal explained that it was. “Aren’t there too many people in our lives, anyway? Patches of sunlight and dark, soundless, nooks and crannies are my highly personalized attempts at visual reveries that should be seen as a homage to that single greatest fact of existence: solitude.”

Talking about his approach to photography, he said, “My personality may or may not get exposed in the process. I’d like to call the pictures in my recent exhibition ‘fragment-of-awareness’. To some people, they seemed like mind-games, not unlike a Rorschach test, out of which they came out feeling a little tricked and with ‘Oh-of-course-it’s-a-pavement-closeup’ feeling. The viewer swims in a sea of the vibrant, moving, images on gigantic plasma screens with 5.1 surround sound. So, if an image of mine can arrest him for even 30 seconds, and he feels a heightened awareness or intensity about the subject, then I’ve been successful in expanding 1/60th of a second into relative infinity. This is my personal yardstick for a successful still-image.”

Asked how one can judge a good photograph from a bad one, Kamal responded, “One man’s spinach is another man’s poison ivy. You show me one more silhouetted palm against a glorious sunset and I’ll puke. But, but, it maybe quite ‘good’, successful for all I know. If I were to say what makes a photograph ‘a feast for the eyes’, I’d say it in three words: design, design, design.”

Referring to the lack of recognition for the local talent in the field of photography, Kamal said that even in the world capitals of photography a suspicion lurked somewhere that while they considered applying brush to canvas, or charcoal to paper, the act of taking photographs was inherently lowly. Over here, except for a handful of photographers, the scenario is dismal.

Speaking about the impact of computer on still photography, Kamal said that the ease and availability of a wide range of manipulative computer tools are only just that: tools. “They will not and do not produce great images on their own; garbage in and garbage out still holds. Commercial photography has been revolutionised by these tools, but in personalized, expressive, works this laissez-faire manipulative freedom seems to produce works which are like the protestations of a hysterical patient: they do not mean quite what they claim to mean. With these tools in hand, I’d stick to Anzia Yezierkaz’s ‘the real thing creates its own poetry’.”