Photoscapes | Mask Attack

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Mask Attack
Text by Binu Bhaskar
Published: Volume 17, Issue 1, January, 2009

This is an account of the incident which took place on October 24, 2008.
I was staging a group of five people whose faces were covered by white rags, and photographing them in a variety of mundane positions and some sculptural poses such as the Christian Pietá. After I had finished shooting and while going through the stills, the doorbell rang, and through the fish hole on the door we spotted a group of armed men ready to burst into the apartment.

It turned out that some neighbours from across the street had been frightened by the scenes we had been staging, and they had alerted the police. The inspector stayed back and questioned me again and again WHY I had taken those pictures and WHAT exactly did I mean by them. And it was obvious what he was seeing, and what the neighbours had seen: terror.

MASK
A leaf falls of its own accord.
We cut a tree. We organise.
Our convenience.
A tree doesn’t complain immediately.
Our convenience.

No-body owns. Only greed does.
Nobody is born with a mask.
Taking up a mask or walking the path of greed
At the start, are very slow steps.
Self-destruction.
Our convenience.

And while masks fight greed.
In the streets
Red is still the colour of innocent blood.

Behind a mask only fear is visible.
How can fear fight greed.

Greed can be dethroned
By understanding the power of dust.
Becoming a mirror.
A fertile dust is much more honorable than a scared mask.

When we hide behind a mask, we lament our own death.
When we hide behind a mask, we lament our own greed.


Binu Bhaskar has a diploma in illustrative photography from Photography Studies College, Melbourne. He found success in Dubai with advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi. His recent shows are Di stance, Synonyms and White Lies.

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