Sven Christian [SC]: Maybe we start with the photo-emulsions,  and how you began working in that way?

Anuja Dasgupta [AD]: Okay, so, do you want the long answer or do you want the short answer? 

SC: Always the long answer.

AD: Alright, so, photography is something that I’ve been practicing quite organically. My approach was far from formalised, but I have always been very invested in image, no matter what I am doing. After a point, having practiced photography, I withdrew. For some reason, I didn’t like the ever presence of images and how something’s literally frozen in time. I still haven’t figured out why. I find myself repulsed. But that was the starting point, and I went back to the fundamentals of photography. That’s when I fell in love with light. 

When I started studying the fundamentals of photography I really wanted to get my hands dirty as well. That’s when I started making emulsions. In terms of what I’m doing now, it all started back home where I was basically just walking by the river and there was a bunch of wild growth of this particular berry called the sea buckthorn — a favourite for all kinds of cattle. I was just plucking some to eat and when it squished between my fingers, that thought came to me, about the plant juice essentially getting exposed to sunlight. I began to wonder what would happen if I leave this out. Would the orange of the berry turn a different colour? That sparked a series of experiments with many kinds of berry emulsions, and the orange did turn to a yellow; the greens did turn to browns; and I had nothing to do with it.

This was all the work of “someone” else. So that also took me back to where it actually began, for me. Like I said, I’m not formally trained in photography, but when I was little I used to read up about what one would call basic optics, and my father happens to be a doctor. He specialises in pharmacology, so he had easy access to drugs. Through him, I got my first photo-emulsions,  because I read up on something called cyanotype when I was a teenager and, to cut a long story short, he got me all the emulsions required. We made our own for the final experiment, and I remember this particular phase during those years where I would wait for a full moon. Because of course, at home, we didn’t have a dark room. We would wait for a full moon to work on the terrace and I would work with these gloves and go crazy with basic physics. When I started working with berries, say ten years later, it brought me back to that very special moment, when I did not even think of becoming an artist. I think that reminder spurred me on. That still very much stays with me, whenever I work with sunlight. So yeah, that’s how it all began. That’s the long answer.

SC: I want to quiz you on your interest in light, especially when it comes to light’s alchemical effect. As opposed to just illuminating something, you’re talking about how it changes things, in a sort of biodegradable way?

AD: I remember reading something a while ago about how, as humans, we moved from natural sunlight to candlelight, which one could say is artificial, because that’s a source of light that you make — that’s not really given to you. So, that had a profound impact on me and my thinking about light. 

I’m based in a very remote region, in the mountains. About eight years ago, I experienced a series of events that really affected me: flash floods and various kinds of disasters, really. That drove home the fact that I, as a creative practitioner, also need to rethink my medium. When I realised that the one medium always available to me is light, I knew that I had to work with it. It was a clearer decision now, in retrospect. I don’t necessarily look for other mediums. I try to work with what’s around and I think that still applies, because I try to forage as much as possible. I am very hesitant when it comes to adding something new to my work, even if it makes it better. I try to make the best of what’s available and that thought drives everything that I make. 

SC: Before we get too deep into the minutae, can we step back a bit and just talk about what photo emulsions are, and how you get from, say, a berry, through to your works on paper? 

AD: Yes, so, for somebody who doesn’t understand, I’m sure something that’s far more relatable would be when you keep a leaf or flower in between the pages of your diary. After some time, when you open it, you see an impression. That’s essentially what happens with what I do. 

So, I take any surface — mostly watercolour paper; something that can absorb any kind of liquid — and then I make my emulsion. If I’m working with a flower, that means I’ll get the petals, grind them into a paste, and then sieve the liquid that comes out through something like a muslin cloth to get an even emulsion. Then I simply coat the surface of the paper with the emulsion.

If I need a photograph of a leaf, I then take that leaf and place it on a sheet with the emulsion and put it out in the sun. Under sunlight, the area around the leaf gets exposed, but the area underneath doesn’t. After a certain amount of time (whatever the ideal exposure time for that emulsion is), you take your sheet out of the sunlight and when you remove the leaf, you’ll see a kind of bleached image of the leaf, and that’s all it takes. The chemical reaction happens around the leaf, so it looks like the area around the leaf has been bleached, because the area underneath is dark. That’s the 101 of what i do, really. 

SC: You mentioned that, depending on the kind of emulsion you’re using, the outcome is going to vary. I imagine over time you’ve got used to the way that particular emulsions might respond to light, to achieve a desired effect? 

AD: That’s another thing. I never know what’s going to come out. But I tend to leave it out to get at least a day’s sun, good sun. If nothing comes out, then I leave it for a week. That’s when I start seeing some faint responses. Having said that, some plant matter is far more light sensitive, especially berries, or some bright flowers.

To date, I understand how plant colour works in a very rudimentary way. I’m far from an expert in this. I know that if a flower is bright red, it won’t necessarily yield a bright red emulsion. It will likely give me a pale yellow or brown emulsion. If, say, I’m working with a purple flower, similarly it might not give me a purple emulsion. That’s stage one. Stage two is the reaction to light, which is always interesting to work with. For a start, it turns a lighter shade and then suddenly it turns to a very surprising colour. I say that because when I leave my prints out in the sun it’s not only the sun that has an effect. It’s also the moisture in the air, the wind...  There are so many things that we often overlook. More often than not these emulsions also oxidize and give me browns. That’s what happens when I leave the prints out, so this ephemerality was really challenging for me to embrace. 

Coming from the perspective of a photographer, where whatever I make stays forever, this is something that is constantly changing as I make it. This aspect is something that I would like to believe I have embraced, but in terms of sharing my work, I know that it’s still unsettling for a lot of people; that, ‘Oh, this was purple, but now it’s brown. It’s such a shame!’ That’s what I usually receive. It might sound very philosophical, but I do believe that this desire for permanence, with everything in life, is what drives all of the problems in the world. I’m not saying I am fighting against all these problems with my little prints, but I’m aware that this is one big reason which runs like a thread across all crises. 

SC: You’ve got a lot of experiments laid out across the table and it doesn’t seem like you’re trying to recreate a particular image of something through, say, the arrangement of leaves. Do you consider the placement of a particular leaf in a particular spot? How much of that is intentional? How much of that is left to chance?

AD: What I’m doing now is brand new. I’m actually way out of my comfort zone. Like I shared with you earlier, I work with the river; I leave all of this up to the river when I work elsewhere, because a river bank is a very active site. There’s river drift, animals that come for water, there’s lots of moss, so I don’t have to do much. I usually work with whatever is given at that time of the day or for that period. But here, because I’m not able to work with the river, I’ve embarked on this new journey, so to speak. I’m actually working with plants that I can broadly categorise as fire resistant. Because when I arrived, one of my first impressions was looking at the charred landscape. So this was the day after I arrived, when I went on a walk with Paul up at Farmhouse58. 

While it’s very normal for people here, it was not at all everyday for me. This is stuff that I’ve read about in books. I’ve seen it in movies, shoots of green coming out of absolute blackness, but not in real life. That held me in a way that I did not expect. I started studying how plants manage to live, despite regular fires. I’m still studying it, and it’s a crazy bank of strategies that these plants have, from stuff like underground organs to their own personal seed banks to these bunches of seeds that are covered in such a thick coating that they actually need fire for the coating to break, so that the seeds can be dispersed. Then there’s stuff like thicker barks, super thin roots, leaves with waxy surfaces and so on and so forth. 

When I read about all of this, the photographer in me wanted to see pictures, but there are none. Not that I could find, at least. There were no any real images of these functions of plants. So I started trying to visualise them on my own. I started making drawings of what a seed dispersal event would look like, or how that little bean of seeds might break after a fire. I started making sketches. Afterwards, I found plants, made emulsions, and tried to paint, for the lack of a better word, what I visualised. That’s when I realised that what I was actually making looked like some cosmic phenomenon. And that’s also the feedback that I’ve received so far. Whoever looks at these prints in progress says they look like galaxies or stars 

SC: My initial response felt microscopic.

AD: Yeah, i guess it’s a going right in or way out. That’s something that I had not imagined at all, but the more I started playing around with the prints, the more I encountered this sense that, ‘Hey, this actually looks like some star stuff.’ And that’s what I’ve arrived at, really; how the microscopic world could mirror the cosmic world. It’s just that we don’t have access to it. It baffles me that we can have the most advanced telescopes — the James Webb — and it’s rendering the most stunning images, but we don’t have an equivalent that goes deep into the ground and shows us what is happening underneath our feet. Given this problem, I thought, ‘Let’s use my creative practice to visualise it.’ Now it’s kind of a celebration of how these plants work. It’s something that is inaccessible to us, we don’t see them doing what they do, there’s also this sense of wonder that comes through, because it’s all rooted in the imagination and when my work is finally ready, I want people to feel that sense of wonder too. This is another reason why I work with plants, because when you look at documentation of plants in general it’s always the same. It’s deeply unsettling when you look at botanical imagery of the last two hundred years. It’s always that very surgical, anatomical look into plants, and then, of course, you go into how this leaf has X or Y or Z medicinal benefit or how it’s tasty... It’s this very extractive approach. Why can’t we play with images of plants in the same way that we imagine other forms of life, even humans? When artists make portraits there are many different forms. You can play around. You don’t need to be as realistic as possible, so why can’t we do the same with plants? This is an argument that I have with myself all the time. I’m also unearthing more and more as I get my hands dirty here, because like I said, it’s new territory for me. 

SC: I also like what you said about how, back home, there are all of these other elements that come into play. How the outcome is always a bit out of your control. Of course, you enter into that process afterwards and make selections about which ones appeal to you, and there’s that dialogue that happens, but I guess I what I find appealing is how, on the one hand, it feels like there is some kind of archival process happening with your works on the river bank (in the sense of documentary photography), whereas here it feels more speculative. 

AD: I like the way you describe it because even the work that I otherwise do... Sometimes I look at it and wonder what a selfie of plants would look like by the river. This is essentially them making their own photographs. I have these crazy thoughts, too, and it’s really like a group photograph of all life by the river, in a very abstract form. So yeah, I like the way you put it. 

SC: But would you say the works here feel more speculative? 

AD: Definitely. I fear oversimplification, to be very honest, when it comes to this concept of the microcosm mirroring the cosmic — is it too simple? —but at the same time this is something that I discover every time I put my paintbrush to paper, so even if it’s an oversimplification, I feel there is some substance to it.

SC: Sure, Horton Hears a Who... But it’s not a simple idea, really. Like it is, but it’s also quite hard to get one’s head around, at least for me.  

AD: It’s also hard because of the lack of real images, right? I mean, I could be biased, but the fact that we don’t have photographs of how these events happen (and by events I mean the survival strategies of plants) — it’s something that I wish people would study in the future. It’s a known fact that there’s a lot to learn from plants; that they do have a different kind of intelligence. There’s also the problem of our vocabulary with all these things, right? We know that when we say intelligence we basically mean human intelligence, so no matter how we use these words, we still relate them to how we work as humans. 

There’s also this sense of how glamorous everything outside of the earth is and how mundane everything here is. Again, it deeply unsettles me. If only we could appreciate what’s around us. I think there’s so much more that can happen. I was also looking at the kind of language we use and the kind of language that scientists use for all these stunning images of space that come out almost every day now. We keep saying we are made of cosmic dust and every part of us is a reflection of what’s out there and all of it sounds pretty glamorous, which is why I wanted to understand how people actually talk about these things, because I’m not an expert, so when I started looking at texts that describe these strategies of plants, it’s again super surgical.

To give you an example, there are these strands of hair, like particles on leaves, which make them waxy. That’s called “pubescence” in plants, but if you take a nebula or something which might have those strands you will call that a “cosmic whirlpool”. That’s an actual term. That’s not out of an op-ed. All of that is so poetic, so I feel this problem runs across disciplines, and somebody needs to recognise that it is a problem in the first place. 

I mean, I’m not in any manner dismissing the magnificent grandeur of whatever is outside. I’m a huge, huge outer space person. I’m one of those people who want to go to space. At the same time, I feel like there’s got to be some more appreciation for what’s down here.