THE STORY
THE EDUCATION OF SEEING
I was born the youngest among ten children, after five
sisters, and grew up surrounded by affection, stories, and the familiar rhythms
of Ajudhan, now known as Pakpattan, a district on the banks of the Sutlej in
Punjab, Pakistan. Home was a place of comfort, but curiosity kept pulling me
beyond it. I would take my bicycle into the inclined streets of the old town
and wander towards the bazaars, neighbouring villages, fields, railway tracks
and water bodies, often without knowing exactly where I was going. I think I
was simply trying to see what was beyond the next turn.
The streets were full of things that held my attention. Old
houses carried traces of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu histories. The bazaars brought
strangers from different parts of Pakpattan, along with tangas, shopkeepers,
voices and the constant movement of people. The iron market had its own sounds;
the grain market had its own textures. Vegetable and fruit carts seemed to
change colour with the seasons. I crossed fields, watched the weather change,
followed water, listened to frogs after rain and watched dragonflies moving
above it. Kite flying gave me another landscape to follow. At that age I didn't
think of any of this as observation. It was simply the world I was living in,
and somehow it was always enough to keep me curious.
The environment gradually became my amusement park, my
laboratory of ecology, my open school and my library of culture. I was learning
without knowing that I was learning. I would stop at things that other people
might simply pass by. Railway tracks fascinated me particularly. I would walk
across the wooden planks between the two parallel lines, stepping carefully and
balancing my arms and body as though I were trying to fly. The two tracks never
met, yet they travelled together towards distant destinations. There was
something almost magical in that contradiction. I also noticed the stones
beneath them. They were pieces of mountains brought into another landscape to
make the railway stronger. A mountain had travelled without moving; it had
become part of another place.
Perhaps I began to understand the world through such
relationships.
Shadows were another fascination. Nobody designed them, yet
they appeared everywhere, created through the meeting of light, objects and
surfaces. They could fall on a wall, water, mud or stone, and they changed
constantly as the light moved. Sometimes I wondered whether the light created
the shadow or whether the surface created it. I still like the question because
I don't feel the need to choose between the two. The shadow exists somewhere
between them. Abandoned walls gave me a similar feeling. They seemed to hold
stories of people, events and sounds that were no longer visible. The wall
remained, while the lives around it had disappeared. I became interested in
these traces long before I had a language for memory.
My Abba's stories opened another kind of space for me. I
loved listening to him because a story could take me somewhere I had never
been. For a child, imagination can be much larger than geography. I drew, wrote
short stories, cycled, walked, wandered and listened. Perhaps this is where
observation and imagination first began to grow together. The world I saw and
the world I imagined were never completely separate.
As I travelled farther, I began to understand that a
landscape is never only something in front of the eye. On a moving road,
foregrounds pass quickly, distant backgrounds move slowly and everything
between them seems to dance. Crossing a bridge changes the sound around you.
Wind behaves differently when you move through an open landscape. Sometimes I
would close my ears with my hands just to hear how the sound of the wind
changed. These experiences made me realise that a place is not only something
we see; we move through it, hear it, feel it and remember it.
This may also be why I have never been interested in
mountains alone. To reach a mountain, you travel through plains, fields,
plateaus, foothills and valleys. The mountain may be one end of the journey,
but everything before it has already become part of the experience. For me, the
journey is often the actual destination.
Photography eventually entered this way of seeing, but I
don't think the camera created it. By the time I take a photograph, my mind may
already have admired a moment, a texture, a story or a relationship. The camera
comes afterwards, almost as a way of saying: keep this. Sometimes a photograph
works like a time machine. Years later, I can look at an old image and suddenly
return to a place, a season, a person or a feeling. A memory becomes a moment
again.
But photography also taught me that the photograph is never
exactly what was in front of me. A landscape may surround me in 180 degrees,
but I select a particular frame and make that fragment the centre of attention.
The photograph changes again when I print it. Scale can transform a small
object into a texture or turn a fragment into an environment. Something that
looked insignificant on a mobile screen can become completely different when
enlarged and encountered physically. For me, photography remains only partly
complete until the image can move beyond the screen and enter another scale,
material or context.
This is why photography has never been my destination. It is
a starting point. An image can move into digital work, painting, mixed media,
installation or an immersive experience. It can enter a public space. It can
change through scale, colour, material or context. I am interested in what
happens to perception when an image is no longer confined to its original
frame.
Over more than two decades of travelling, walking and
observing, I have built an archive of more than 300,000 photographs. I don't
think of it as a collection of finished images. It feels more like a living
body of visual research. I can return to the same road, village, wetland, city
or landscape and find something different. Sometimes the place has changed;
sometimes the light, people or seasons have changed. Sometimes I have changed.
That alone is enough to make a familiar place unfamiliar again.
This has also changed the way I think about memory. For me,
memory is a sequence. Observation may begin with something remembered, but it
can move towards something new. One moment becomes memory while another begins
to form. Perhaps observation exists in that narrow space between the two. This
is also why walking produces knowledge for me. I may follow a familiar path
because of a memory, but the path opens another horizon, another encounter,
another possibility. The memory changes the journey, and the journey changes
the memory.
I often wonder when an image stops being evidence and
becomes imagination. Sometimes it happens when I make it. I may already imagine
what will happen when I crop it, enlarge it, change its colour or place it in
another context. Sometimes it happens when someone else sees it. A photograph
can suddenly recall something from another person's life, and at that moment it
becomes more than evidence of what I once saw. And sometimes an old image gives
me a new imagination simply because I am no longer the same person who made it.
The photograph remained; I changed.
The same questions gradually led me towards nature. I have
become less certain that nature is something outside us. I remember thinking
about a simple question: why do we consider a rose beautiful but not a
cockroach? Perhaps the question is not really about the rose or the cockroach.
Perhaps it is about who taught us what beauty is. A cockroach may serve an
ecological function that a rose does not, yet our cultural memory gives them
completely different values. My brothers and sisters and I grew up in the same
environment, under the same sky and within the same family, yet we all became
different people with different sensitivities and ways of seeing. The
environment may be shared, but perception is not.
I sometimes describe noticing as an individual's inner
mathematics. Seeing may be common to all, but noticing is personal. Each of us
selects different things, connects different fragments and gives different
meanings to what surrounds us. Perhaps this is why I have always been drawn
towards things that appear ordinary or insignificant. A shadow, a wall, a
stone, a roadside, a bird or a fragment of architecture can become important
when we give it enough attention.
Birds have remained part of this relationship with place in
a very personal way. When I moved into my apartment in 2019, pigeons were
already living there. The building was not properly finished; there were no
windows and doors at first. I remember thinking that this was already a living
place and that I was about to hijack it. So I arranged nests on the terrace
walls before I settled in. The pigeons accepted them. Many have been born there
since then, and we have continued living together. I even named the apartment
on Google: "The Bird House." It may seem like a small story, but for
me it raises a larger question about how we enter a place. Perhaps before we
claim a space as ours, we should notice who is already living there.
This way of seeing eventually moved beyond my own
photographic practice and into public work. In 2006, I founded Carbon Roadside
Arts because I wanted art to travel beyond conventional institutional spaces.
Villages, schools, roadsides, gardens and public spaces could also become
places for art, photography, learning and conversation. A roadside could become
a gallery. A child could become an audience. A community could become a
participant. Art could become something shared rather than something waiting behind
a gallery wall.
Looking back, I can see that the same curiosity that took me
onto the streets of Ajudhan eventually took me onto the roads of Pakistan.
Walking, travelling, observing, photographing, designing, teaching and working
with communities may appear to be different activities, but for me they have
always been connected by the same impulse: to understand what surrounds me by
paying attention to it.
I don't think I am searching for extraordinary subjects. I
am still looking at ordinary things—a wall, a shadow, a road, a stone, a bird,
a railway track, a fragment of architecture, a changing landscape, a person
passing through a place. What changes is not necessarily the thing itself. What
changes is the way I look at it.
Perhaps that is what I have been doing since Ajudhan:
collecting fragments of the world and trying to understand the relationships
between them. The child on the bicycle is still somewhere inside the
photographer. The boy balancing on the railway planks is still wondering how
two lines can travel together without ever meeting. The child watching shadows
is still asking who creates them. The boy listening to his father's stories is
still discovering that imagination can travel farther than geography.
I began with curiosity. Observation became a way of living.
Memory opened new questions. Walking became a form of learning. Photography
became a way of holding what I noticed, and the image became a way of thinking
beyond what I had seen.
I still don't believe the world has given me a final answer.
Perhaps that is why I continue to walk, observe, photograph,
write, travel and wonder.
Every image begins with an act of attention.
But perhaps before attention, there is something even
earlier.
Wonder.
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