Self-taught photographer and visual artist, Farheen Fatima was that kid growing up who would indulge in all sorts of artistic endeavours, from drawing to painting and the crafts, despite knowing she wouldn’t ever excel in the field. Her tenacity to keep at it made her realise it was visuals that helped her communicate best. She ventured towards image making with the point and shoot camera her family already owned, and that was the beginning of everything. She maintains that there was no concrete reason for her actions back then, “You see something and there’s this want or need to preserve it, or maybe I just wanted others to see something the way I saw it. As a teenager it also gave me the confidence that I had a voice too, albeit a visual one.”
The artist’s keen eye for technicality is also something that developed early on. She vividly recalls an old photograph of her mother’s that she couldn’t stop pondering upon. Her mom was dressed to the nines, the room was dark and there was some sort of flash which cast a weird shadow behind her mother, and Farheen couldn’t stop thinking about the way in which it had been shot. “I always wondered why it was so different from the other photos in our house. The light hit my mother differently because of the flash. There was a starkness to it. I remember all the minor details, including the fact that my mom wore a purple suit in it.”
Farheen’s practice tends to revolve around narratives that evoke nostalgia and deal with the complexities like longing and tenderness. There’s always a certain sense of intimacy and daintiness that surrounds her subjects as if they’re in the lap of nature which speaks volumes of her own relationship with the natural world. When it comes to her own emotional reaction to a photograph, she asserts how like any other medium, an image is capable of sussing out an unexpectedly intense moment. “It ends up being something so relatable, or sometimes just goes completely against what you usually feel or think. It helps me explore this wide spectrum of emotions. Nowadays, images which are soft and tender are the ones that touch me the most. I usually envy people who can achieve saying a lot without being loud or creating complicated imagery.”
In the past few years, her practice has evolved in a manner that strives towards using simpler elements and not being excessively over the top. When it comes to her process, Farheen’s imagery is a gamut of elements brought together in a bid to communicate her love and affection. Meaning making isn’t easy, it requires the perfect balance of taking control and letting go of it at the right time for the image maker. Farheen explains, “It begins with me shooting continuously for maybe a year or even three, and then eventually taking a step back to evaluate and sit with things. I tend to sometimes rethink or redo things. Mostly I go with the flow and let the process take precedence.”
With her own body of work, the intent behind it changes from time to time. Of late, Farheen has been exploring the narrative of loneliness that surrounds humanity and the peace and calm that comes with it. “I think there’s an underlying tenderness around loneliness that needs to be explored. It’s like how people say that covid went away but the loneliness remained. Theres was essentially not a conscious effort to highlight but it’s what the audience was taking away from my imagery.”
This made her delve deeper into her own thoughts about why she was subconsciously moving towards this collective phenomena in society and she came to the conclusion that the absence just persists, it doesn’t exist as a void waiting to be filled by presence, it just exists as the act of being with your own self, and the calm that surrounds you, or it could also be chaos, that is possibly being perceived as quietude visually. “It’s like how still water appears when you look at a lake, the trajectory of my work could of course change in the near future, but I do wish to continue with this theme for longer.” Farheen has quite a few interesting projects coming up. To begin with, she wants to continue working on her ongoing series, Meet Me In The Garden. Apart from that, she is also on a journey of learning analogue photography and is quite excited to explore the field further.
Words Unnati Saini
Date 21-06-2023