Dust to Dust

The soft-spoken Kulkarni has an easy smile that defies her bold experiments with the process of photography. “I often hear people say that jugaad karna padta hai. My take is that,do jugaad with your camera too!” she laughs. Over the past five years,Kulkarni has used things as mundane as a door peephole to make her own lens. She drilled a hole into a camera cap and built a mount for her camera though a hollowed-out shuttle-case,wrapped with bits of a black garbage bag. “I wanted to build my own Lensbaby,which sells for close to $270 in the market. I got fantastic shots out of the lens!” Another of her experiments gave birth to a superbly effective TTV (Through The Viewfinder) lens. The periscope-like camera has left her subjects often confused. “With this one,I shoot at the waist-level and not the eye. I feel like a three-year-old looking upto the world,” she chuckles. “The people I shoot always end up looking at the wrong camera.”

Kulkarni works as an independent architect,and considers her camera experiments a hobby. But,both these passions have equally shaped her approach and her liking for city-scapes. “Architecture surely helped me develop a problem-solving facet of designing,and the need to make aesthetics clear. I have never made a single calculation ever,its all just trial and error. It’s an approximation at the most,its the idea that matters first.”

Some numbers and references to formulae did come tumbling out of Kulkarni at the demo. But she swears that it’s not numbers that she is into. “If I come across a calculation for something I am trying to build,I usually just follow it. I never read up on the whys. In fact,I can’t assimilate too much text at all,only visual representations work for me.” And she understands that all the talk about aperture,depth-of-field,bokeh,et al,can be intimidating. “The point is not to get scared of it. Once the basic principles behind cameras are understood,anyone can experiment.”

Kulkarni however usually stays away from photography workshops; “I don’t want to get into professional photography. I have my own thing going.” This includes repairing old cameras. Kulkarni revived an old camera sometime back and used a 35mm film in it. She has cleaned and fixed up a 1947 camera and got ‘thrilling’ pictures from a trip to Rajasthan. “I say the dirtier the camera,the better. Let it gather dust. The irregularities in the pictures are fantastic!”