Work in progress and to be updated....
When The Curtain Falls
I always love being behind the lens more. But there’s something I love about getting in front of the lens and posing for other’s at my comfort. There is often a vivid memory of me getting photographed in photo studios when I was young since the primary school for the enrollment photo. Though I hardly practice studio photography since I became a photographer, my fondness for photo studios never faded away. At one point, I started dropping by at photo studios in towns during my travels and got my photo taken. I learned that many of those photo studios have been getting smaller and dimmer, eventually shrinking. They are barely surviving. Many of them set in very small corners, hanging those imperfect blue, red, grey and white backdrops and let the space as messy as it is as a result of the photographer or the whole family have to share the space to stay as their shelter or home.
I keep visiting different photo studios across the country during my travels. I document the portraits of those studio spaces from their signature blue backdrops and the little details to what is happening inside them and how the photographers are passing their times amidst a very slow business. The most fun part is getting the photos taken by the photographer following their instructions on my poses and sometimes collaborating for some crazy ideas, waiting there spending time with them, seeing them working on the picture and photo-shopping and collecting humorous pictures of me finally.
There are times I can’t stop smiling by witnessing how most of them badly but very lovingly photo-shop me, transform me and the image itself and set the beauty standard of a person and a woman through a studio photograph. I would make sure I photograph their portrait inside their own studio through my lens before I leave the studio. And I would give them their pictures when I visit next time.
“When The Curtain Falls” is about finding and building personal connections and relationships between myself and photo studio spaces that I love so much and the people who keep protecting those memorable places, as a solace to my fear that those PHOTO STUDIOs will be vanishing in a not-so-distant-future.
*”When The Curtain Falls” was started in 2018 and is an ongoing project.
