Release Yourself

by Pradeep Dalal

There is a party going on. Dancers are smiling, singing along, arms flailing, butts swaying, dancing real close, warm-breath-in-the-ear close, crotch-to-crotch close, hand-on-shoulder close. A long way from these freedoms, I am looking for this party!

The potency of a single distilled image, or even a sequence of images, no matter how beautiful, is something I question. I prefer to bring together a variety of photo genres, multiple moments, time periods, and a range of textures into the frame of a single image. Montage is a more robust means to bring together disparate - even contradictory - aspects of my experiences. I like both the grating friction among the various parts of the montage and the moments when the seams dissolve and the juxtaposed bits coagulate fluently.

Ideas speed travel via books and music across all manner of divides - geography, culture, and time. How then to bring some sense of this jaunty motion into the frame of a still photograph, while simultaneously chipping away, melting, bleeding, disintegrating the rectangular frame of a snapshot.

Release Yourself (Clubhouse #1)