The Hindu Sunday Magazine. December 2nd 2018
Digital photobooks
Mumbai Paused, now an Instagram handle, has over 24,000 followers, many of whom have followed him from other platforms. The loyal readership prompted him, last year, to start making digital photobooks. But he chose to bypass the conventional route: no exhibitions, no publisher, not even the well-known online retailers; just his photos, his text, his layouts, and his own site, footpathbookshop.com.
The Internet lets you make and sell things, Gopal says, so why not? He wants to destroy conventional publishing. “They are gatekeepers who will not talk to me. You need to be of a certain background, a certain college, a certain community.” Later, mellower, he says, “I don’t blame them: there’s no money in it unless you’re a famous photographer. Photobooks are vanity projects. If you’re a full-time photographer, it becomes your calling card; even if it doesn’t sell, it gives you a name. I don’t need that, because that’s not my job.”
He likes down-playing his identity — most people don’t know the name and face behind the handle, he says — and his skills. He still uses a point-and-shoot, and says, “I’m not a photographer photographer or a writer who writes. I’m just a copywriter, a blogger who takes street pictures.”
The smell of fish
The books are rooted in the blogs where, over time, themes sprout. “I find a pattern, put a hashtag to it, and continue.” Five such e-books have coalesced thus, with photos from his bank plus a few shot for particular books: Plastic People explores consumerism; Vishwakarma documents work; The Ghost of Good Things is about how children play in a city with no space; Aam Artist Gallery is the art of workers; and Mumbai Turmeric is about the Pochamma Panduga festival celebrated in the Kamathipura precinct (the last is free, the others cost ₹100 or ₹350).
And he’s just launched Matsyagandha, which means the smells of fish, which Gopal thinks is the odour that underlays all the other smells of the city. (It is also, he says, another name for Satyavati, a character in the Mahabharata, and the name of an express train that runs down the Konkan coast to Mangalore.) The book tries to pull off a difficult ask: capture olfactory impressions through visual cues. There are fish, of course, fresh, rotting, drying, salted, cooking. And also the smell of work, of worship, of a disappearing past threatened by spaces, of rain, rivers, rust, and rot.
Future books are germinating in the hashtags: #RedRemains, #DalitBlue, #SaffronTide, #IndianMale, #TreesOfMumbai. Or maybe not. But they will about this city; or if life takes him elsewhere, other cities. “Wherever you go, migration to the cities — the city story — is the biggest story in India.”
