Photography as Reconciliation :
The Art of Chandan Gomes Johny ML

Only with a shudder, Chandan could remember 16th December, 2012. After
a house party at a friend’s pad, he was returning home with a female friend in a
chartered bus at night. The next morning he woke up seeing the horrifying news of the
rape of a young woman in a moving chartered bus, screaming from the newspapers’
headlines and television channels. The first thought that came to him was that; the
victims could have been him and his female friend as they, too, had taken a deserted
chartered bus that night. The days that followed were eventful. A revolution was
taking shape in and around Delhi. People, both young and old, irrespective of class,
caste and gender gathered around Jantar Mantar and the Parliament Street to protest.
The Government, ironically, confronted the peaceful protest of the people with water
cannons and lathis. They curbed the people’s movement with draconian laws. Still,
people were coming back like guerrilla fighters. Chandan was there in the streets
all those days, pulled in by the magnetism of the movement and the immensity of a
deferred calamity in his own personal life. He saw a movement shaping in front of
his eyes, and his friends were drawing the contours of it with their spilled blood due
to the police lathis. He could not have done anything else than climbing up on the
ramparts of the Rashtrapati Bhavan and click photographs, in an involuntary act of
registering of history. Chandan’s series ‘Unknown Citizen’ was born then and there.
However, Chandan, as his philosophical bent of mind goads him, does not want
to be known for creating that series. He has a different story; a story of his own being
and nothingness. Chandan belongs to a family that has been living in a single room
house for generations. He was born and brought up in that single room. But, he got the
best education possible in Delhi and had the best of friends from the creamy layer of
Delhi’s society. Chandan, during his formative years, felt life to be something caught between two realities which he could not resolve. It originated as a crisis, but soon
became an existential issue, perhaps destined to lead him through his youthful years
and creative life. Chandan says that his works are not about addressing sociological
issues of deprivation and penury; nor does he want to look at his younger days as a
‘problem’ that would affect him throughout his life. But he picks up the camera to
understand it more intimately, like a writer fictionalizes everything around him to
understand his own life