On Proximity, Interstices and Observation: In Conversation with Arthur Crestani

Photographs of urban residential architecture initiate a conversation on how representations of lived spaces can convey the diversity of the textures and realities of everyday life, operating outside of a focus on preserving the sanitised monumentality and geometry of buildings. This offers us a glimpse into the complexities of human relationships with regard to space—something to which Arthur Crestani’s work continues to return. His documentary work, Aranya, displayed at the Chennai Photo Biennale (2021–22), is a study of the eponymous low-cost housing project conceived of by BV Doshi in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. In its expanse as a photographic project, Aranya moves beyond indexicality, contextualising urban history and memory within the present moment of socio-economic development and aspiration. In conversation with Crestani, Annalisa Mansukhani discusses his interactions with the neighborhood, and the kinds of longevity to which both its inhabitants and architecture aspire.

Annalisa Mansukhani (AM): What did photography allow you to imagine and produce as part of your contemplations within Aranya? How did your positionality within the neighborhood further explicate this?

Arthur Crestani (AC): I first came to India for an exchange programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2010–11, and then regularly returned to Delhi—where I had forged strong relationships—until 2014. I travelled again to India episodically in 2016 and 2017, and during this period I made the Bad City Dreams series in Gurgaon. I learnt about Aranya at the end of 2017 through my friend Marie Pla, an urban planner who was working in Ahmedabad at the time. Coincidentally, another friend, Thierry Mandoul, who teaches architecture in Paris, was keen to learn about Aranya, along with his colleague Enrico Chapel. At that time, Mandoul had already been taking his students on study trips to Chandigarh. We all agreed to meet in Indore to visit Aranya for a couple of days, and I stayed there a few more days in order to photograph it.

Given the short duration of my stay, my main goal was to create a representation of it as an architectural and urban experiment, where the material form would tell a human story. Being an experimental affordable housing project, I was keen to represent both the social and architectural dimensions of the neighbourhood. Prior to my visit, I had consulted various materials available online, which mostly focused on the social engineering of Aranya. As a housing project, it stands out for two reasons: it is an incremental project in which the original residents—who mostly belonged to the urban poor—built their own homes themselves; and it is a socially mixed neighbourhood, as the sale of the larger, more expensive plots of land funded the overall project.

I organised my days around the scouting of locations, taking photographs with a large format camera. These were exclusively taken at dawn or at dusk, because I wanted to avoid hard shadows and present the architectural subjects in a soft, warm light. Carrying a limited number of film sheets, and with so few days to work, I was keen to find significant locations for the photographs. There was an urgency to this process, especially when shooting, as I could only make up to five such photographs a day.

I spent the rest of the day walking across every sector of Aranya, making a conscious effort to go through every lane or street. I photographed urban scenes and made portraits using a Rolleiflex (medium format) camera. These were spontaneous photographs which, because of the difference in light and equipment, seemed like a different project. The results were more enigmatic and consisted of portraits, mostly of men in contemplative postures, curious urban details, and signs that spoke of the peoples’ lives. These images conveyed a sense of vulnerability, which echoed the precarious position of Aranya as a social utopia that is now engulfed by Indore’s growth. I saw this as a metaphor for urban India’s condition too.

Much later, I realised that the different scenes I had captured were not contradictory but complementary. They told the story of a day in the neighbourhood, from the eerie silence of the mornings to the fall of night. They contemplated the passage of time in a single unit of space. It took me close to two years to finally edit the two projects together in the single project named Aranya.

AM: The text accompanying the work mentions the limits of the “optics of recognition” surrounding the project, with regard to a primary focus on BV Doshi’s interventions in it. Keeping with the copious nature of the landscape of Aranya and its tensions, what did you find yourself inclined to photograph more?

AC: While Aranya is remarkable for having been designed by BV Doshi—one of India’s most distinguished architects—its singularity lies in the subtlety of the architect’s imprint on the neighbourhood. Most of the pieces on Aranya, especially those which came up in early 2018 when Doshi was awarded the Pritzker Prize for his architectural career, featured photos of the experimental homes he designed to kickstart the project in the early 1980s. The eighty-odd houses that make up the four lanes locally known as “Lal Bangla” (after their original colour)—most of them unrecognisable today—are considered to be Doshi’s architectural legacy in Aranya. But what are eighty houses in a neighbourhood of 80,000 people? Their experimental dimension, and the signature of the architect, resulted in the visual reduction of Aranya to these few houses.

The audacity and the strength of Aranya as an urban project rather lay in the architect’s humility, in the recognition that housing for the poor needed to be designed by the poor and at a slower pace. The other legacy of Doshi’s design was the Master Plan, which is sophisticated and intricate, with a complex layout of narrow roads, paths and lanes that connect a variety of public spaces. I was impressed by the implementation of the Plan, which allowed for a vibrant use of space by the residents. How urban public space was made and preserved, through degrees of separation between the public and the private, was the first aspect of Aranya I tried to capture. Planning for potential uses and interactions in a neighbourhood is a perilous exercise, one which BV Doshi sought to give an open answer to.

AM: Your previous works—Quatre Vingt Six, Bad City Dreams, Plaine de France—take notice of the fluidities and exigencies of constantly changing landscapes as well as the interactions that arise between architectural and infrastructural style, and urban design. With this in mind, how does the documentary as a term or a genre emerge within your practice? What does it permit you in your encounters with both familiar and unfamiliar terrains?

AC: My desire to work on a subject emerges from my familiarity with it. The two countries where I have made the most of my work are India and France, and in both cases making photographs was a long process. It is only after a lot of thinking and reflecting on a subject—be it real-estate advertising in Gurgaon (Bad City Dreams), social housing in India (Aranya), the Northern Paris suburbs (Plaine de France) or the A86 ring road around the same suburbs (Quatre Vingt Six)—that I feel ready to make work. At that point, it becomes an urge.

Architecture and urban planning are products of social, economic and political conditions. As they make up our immediate environment, they contribute greatly to one’s mental space and wellbeing. Over time, they become highly personal and elicit a wide gamut of emotional responses. My documentary practice acts as a bridge between the material environment, built or not, the people that inhabit it, and the representations of place, the other and the self, taking on a psychological dimension. Making the Aranya project was a turning point in my creative process. It taught me to be more open to the subject and less rigid with pre-shoot planning, letting myself be receptive to ideas and interpretations emerging from the ground.

Documentary photography is the product of one’s relationship with reality. For me, it is about being in one place and questioning the making of space from that position. It offers room to interpret the environment. In this way, a dialogue starts between the unknown and the familiar. In and around the making of Aranya, I had in mind my experience of Delhi—South Delhi in particular—as a point of reference. Any specific subject condenses larger issues previously encountered. The documentary is tributary to finding the right balance between the singular and the general.

Aranya is currently on view till 6 February 2022 as part of the Chennai Photo Biennale.

To read more about the third edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, please click here, here, here and here.

All images and captions from Aranya by Arthur Crestani. Images courtesy of the artist and the Chennai Photo Biennale.