city of photos

the sense of longing when looking at old photographs is inescapable. there is a yearning to complete in the throes of rose tinted nostalgia what exists only in our imagination and was never really real. sometimes it can get a little icky, this sweetness. but then there is the love of the heterotopia of the photo studio taking us to places we have not been. here desire is uncontrolled and unfurled behind smiling faces through the taj mahal and the garden- the construction of new identity and the resolution of difficult desires through the evidence of the photograph. this exists. or rather also –this existed.

the man who paints photographs of corpses and makes them alive, the girl who carefully archives herself through the images she makes; and the violent disaster backgrounds that become pretty pictures for smiling faces were all very interesting. the squalor / garden binary was maybe a little pat for my tastes but the story had its complications; and maybe i could have done without the below the belt jokes about the poses that people strike in front of the camera- skinny men becoming hritik roshan, or girls striking titanic poses, or lovers wanting to be stars above the taj mahal. or maybe it is just my own unnecessary hypersensitivity that makes me scowl while others were laughing. still liked the film a lot- overall.