In early 2013, I was one among four artists invited that year for a two-month long ALTlab photography residency hosted in a family estate in Dongorpur in north Goa. A guest house had been repurposed by the Goa Centre for Alternative Photography (Goa-CAP) to accommodate a lounge with cane furniture, a library of photo books and cyclostyled manuals, a nook for an ageing desktop computer tethered to a scanner, a verandah with red oxide flooring, and a photographic darkroom of a very special kind.
The program’s intention was to rekindle and foster the learning of analog photography—a term used for all the chemical processes to capture an image, typically on paper, film, or a hard surface—and encourage contemporary artists to adopt them into their practice.
Due to the resounding popularity of digital photography among the masses, many of the analog processes have been forgotten, and pushed to the brink of extinction. While they are unique and have their idiosyncrasies, analog processes have celebrated the diversity in photography, allowing the artist a variety of variables to play around with.
At Baga beach in Goa, I collected sea water and diluted the concentration of sodium chloride (one of the main ingredients of the process) to the prescribed two per cent with which I could then make prints of the photographs I had taken at the bakery The real beauty of the process was, however, a pleasant surprise—the organic substances that came along with the sea water, like plankton and algae, imparted its own tonality and hue to the print. So, prints made with water collected from different beaches in Goa looked delightfully different from each other. And, this was a great excuse to go beach hopping every now and then!