/ 2011 / Book (series Only) / People
Cmon Charlie Cmon
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Photographer
Bikramjit Bose, India
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Website
From the very onset of this project, every time I told someone what I intended to do - spend 45 days living with a traveling circus - the idea aroused a lot of interest, enthusiasm and even envy in the people I met. And why wouldnâ??t they be excited? Yes, living with a circus does sound almost magical, doesnâ??t it?
The word â??magicalâ?? brings to mind a book Iâ??d read as a kid â?? â??The Magic Faraway Treeâ?? by Enid Blyton and that truly was magical. This however - living with a circus, the circus itself, only sounds magical. The reality of it is a little different.
While itâ??s a rather romanticized â??Life in the Circusâ?? for the awestruck outsider, for the artists however, itâ??s just â?? life. My intention here was to portray, not that outsiderâ??s perception of these artists and their lives, but simply to reveal the way it was and tell it like it is, and thereâ??s no magic there.
The images here arenâ??t intended to show the circus in all its colorful glory and â??largerthanlifeâ??-ness.
My experience, through the images, of what their lives are - only serve to show the utter normalcy that exists in their lives. Even an attempt to maybe, show that disparity that exists between the outsidersâ?? perception of the circus life and the essentially banal that it actually is.
These photographs are an attempt to break that perception â?? showing them as regular people, as human, as normal, even as boring as any of us â?? dropping their â??actâ?? to reveal themselves and their reality â?? one that is far away from all the Circus fanfare, and even further away from Enid Blytonâ??s enchanted tree.
Bikramjit Bose is a graduate from The Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, during the course of which he spent a year apprenticing New Delhi-based photographer Pradeep Dasgupta and then moved to Mumbai in 2008 to pursue photography professionally. After assisting photographer Farrokh Chothia for a brief period, in 2009 he started out on his own - doing commissioned work for magazines like Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and GQ.
With a fly-on-the-wall approach to photography, his is an attempt to capture a somewhat raw, even fleeting portrayal of the subject.
A posed, conventionally perfect image is never as fascinating or as intriguing as one with that certain sense of 'un-pose', if you will. There should always be room left for the unpredicted.