Shutter islands

Known for documenting urban culture, photographer Joel Sames is in the city working with younger hip-hoppers as well as indie musicians

Amid the chaos of peak hour traffic at Ninety Foot Road at Dharavi, it’s difficult getting directions to any place, leave alone finding a room without a proper address. But the small 100-sq ft kholi that functions as NGO Sneha’s office by day and a learning centre for another NGO, Tiny Drops, in the evening is packed. Eager children gather to learn breakdancing under the guidance of Mumbai-based Bboy crew Slum Gods. On Tuesday, however, it wasn’t a regular class. With a team from Japan shooting with the children for a documentary on hip hop culture in Mumbai, the young Bboys are louder than usual, competing with each other both in decibel levels and in their moves. But the loudest response is reserved for photographer Joel Sames, who is helping the documentary team.

Over the past four years, the 38-year-old, who specialises in capturing urban street cultures, has built a relationship with Bboy crews just like Slum Gods, across India and the world. “I am fascinated with the empowering qualities of street culture and the ability of these subcultures to subvert the perception of public spaces. For example: graffiti can change the way a neighborhood looks overnight, or how skateboarders use objects in public spaces such as handrails or ledges in a way that they were not meant to be,” says Sames.

On his fifth visit to the country, the Swiss native is in town to shoot a music video for the alternative electronic music duo, Shaa’ir + Func. A combination of stop motion and animation, the first rushes of the video were good enough to land him an artist residency at Bandra-based What About Art?, which will culminate in a mini-exhibition at the end of February. Sames says, “The video was shot at a time when nightclubs were being shut down. So it has this fight against the system feel to it. By the end of the residency, I hope to also showcase photographs of Mumbai’s Bboys.”

Sames is a visual anthropologist; with photographs that are a mix of art and journalism, he documents cultures. Back at the Tiny Drops centre, Seams captures the swift movements of the dancers with slow shutter speed. The images produced have dancers frozen in the frame with lights dancing around them. His photo essays though have hardly any of these kind of pictures. Instead, they document the culture around his subjects.

His 2012 visit to India ended with a trip to a tiny village in Gujarat. Sames was part of an outreach programme, which was an experiment where they took hip hop, an essentially urban form of art, to a municipal school in a village. “It was a total clash of cultures, but it was amazing how much respect they had for what we were doing,” he says. He has worked with children in Uganda and Cambodia too, where Bboying has had an impact in slums where children could easily join gangs.

It’s clear that Sames is not just a photographer, he has an activist streak too. In post-war northern Sri Lanka he devised a programme that got resettled Tamils to shoot photos of their neighborhood. He then asked them to select a photograph and draw anything they would like to change around them. He then got art students from a nearby college to paint these on the houses. “The idea was to give these children a voice and sense of belonging,” he says. In Kabul, in association with Skateistan, he got people to donate 300 skateboards to children in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the boards got stuck in Pakistan and never made it to Kabul. As for the dancers in Mumbai, “For now, I am helping them in the most basic way — clicking photographs of them so they can put it online. Hopefully, it will encourage more children to take it up,” he says.

kevin.lobo@expressindia.com

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