“Photography is my obsession. Passion is something you do after your work, I don’t have anything, this is my whole life”
What does career mean for you?
The career question, right. For me as an artist, career is a very important thing, it’s not just a key thing. I’m doing what I’m doing because I don’t have any other choice, I don’t have any other choice in doing photography and so and that’s my life.
Is that your passion?
It’s my obsession. Passion is something you do after your work, I don’t have anything, this is my whole life, it’s just that this is a kind of necessary framework that puts bread on my table and it’s a lot of work of course, actually I have to work on a lot of practical things. It’s not easy to make a living as an artist.
What do you think will be your next milestone?
My next milestone will be my next artwork.
How did you figure out the camerawork? What inspired you to come out with that sort of a camera?
That’s obsession. And it’s really difficult to answer these things because you’re not planning this. You cannot plan. It’s kind of you’re flowing, you’re floating, with your life and you’re floating with the elements around you and let yourself be in this kind of balancing game.
You’re going with the flow?
Yeah, I mean with my own flow. It’s pretty structured, that way, my life is pretty structured but at the same time, it cannot be structured because if your life is structured as an artist, you lose your spirit, you lose your ideas. The drive, the motive has to come from somewhere that has to be free. If you cannot let that part of your personality free, you stop being an artist and you start repeating yourself, you start doing things in a maniacal way. That’s what inspiration is, you’re blown by the wind, by the breeze, it’s better to be blown by the breeze than by the wind.
Are you goal-oriented? If yes, have you charted out a map for the next five years of your life?
I can say no, right? Of course I am, but it depends on… There are different successes for an artist to do work that pleases me is one sort of success, and get recognition with that work is another kind of success that has to do with career. I think that in terms of artists, it’s the least important one and so that’s not the kind of success when you exhibit that thing and it makes it happen and you make it work, because art happens when an artist makes his piece, but it actually happens when it happens in someone else’s mind when someone looks at your work and it actually triggers people to think about something in my opinion that’s the real place where art happens when it affects people and it talks, because you do your artwork and for me as an artist that’s when your art really starts working, so if we can say that it’s the goal, then that’s my goal with my words. I think I’ve answered this question.
India has talent and it has largely remains unharnessed. India’s progress is in fits and starts. Can you suggest three ideas/points that would benefit India in the long-term?
If you give yourself any other choice than doing that, you wouldn’t make it, because excuses come. I’m not doing it because… I have other things to do or that I don’t get the opportunity or get the support then you’re not going to make it.
If you have no other choice, then you’re going to go through the wall, because there’s no other choice. If it doesn’t work out, you will find out how to make it work out. What I really want to achieve is going to be hard and you have to be ready for it and that’s why I say that if you don’t have any other choice, if you have other choices, you lose your strength because then you go to the easier way which is not completing it, and then you will do something else, and you will leave your dreams behind or forfeit them.
Traveler, artist, visualizer and a self-taught photographer, Adam has invented a new type of photography allowing him to take high-resolution photos of speeding trains and passengers in the subway and turning this footage of seconds into minutes.
