Gautam Narang

I am 20 years old and found photography by mistake, when doing my GCSE, I was sitting in the study room, then heard a teacher describe the subjects they taught at the school. As he was going through the subjects, he mentioned photography. I thought to myself was this a subject? Photography! It’s so easy, all you do is click (How, wrong I was, how very wrong) *sigh*. As a child I used to play around with cameras. I always looked through them as was interested In them.

So I sat in the lesson and was very enthusiastic to start a creative art. The journey had begun. One of the first subjects I started to picture was boats …..mmm yes boats. I lived near a canal and started to photograph boats. I don’t know why I picked boats, it’s quite sad when I look back, but that was one of my subjects. I took thousands of photographs, trying to make the subjects look Interesting. I remember one day I took all my photographs and filled up a whole table. The obsession had started but I hadn’t known. Pictures now filled my room. From the start I always wanted to show my best. I would keep a box of my best photographs and then throw away all the one’s I didn’t like. I always feel the next picture is my favorite picture, wanting to create new work.

As I progressed through my studies, I became distracted. There were so many subjects to do and I tried them all. One week I was doing art of history, then chemistry. I then dropped them all and just focused on photography. To this day, I follow photography. I have learned a lot but I am still confused on what to do next. I love what I do, but everybody tells me go into other things. Photography is more than clicking a button. From my first trip In India I have learned more about life then I would from anything. It teaches you to look, understand and observe rather then just walk away.
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artistic statement

What is photography? What is art? What is the point of it? It’s everything around us and it’s yourself, there is no point. It’s putting your thoughts on paper, in an instant expressing more than words can, so many things. Photography and art isn’t limited to the medium, it’s more than that, I believe the real art is the artist and the world, this is what inspires us. What catches one person’s eye, but another walks past? With photography I have learned the value of detail. It has taught me to look for details, to look for things, this is more than clicking a button. The camera simply allows the user to catch the image; it is the artist who sees it. The way I think life is full of speeded up days, what the camera does is crop this so you can focus on what you want. It takes a moment, and stretches it to infinity. Photography gives us the calm of observing that moment properly, and life is like this to me, full of clutter, and very special moments. In India, I saw uncensored reality, real poverty, real madness, not the sanitized cleaned up, behind closed doors society of Britain. But why are these themes so interesting to me? Because they are more real, everyone identifies with the underdog, not many can identify with the entrenched falsity of the ruling classes. This is where photography is different, it is designed to raise questions rather than answers, but the result is that artists will remain unfulfilled, because in their quest for answers, they simply raise more questions. Don’t take anything on face value, everything can be doctored even these words, read them once, forget them, and go make your own art.