I was born and raised in Delhi and have always had a lucid memory of the Yamuna river. My conscious visual memory of the river started with my bachelor’s education at a college in Shastri Park(in Delhi), which led me to travel from Ashram to Shastri Park(places in Delhi) every day. In doing so, I crossed the Yamuna river twice daily. I noticed the river flooding in the post-monsoon season and shrinking during the pre-monsoon season. This conscious act of observing the river every day, no matter how banal an activity it may have been then, steadily built an understanding in my mind. My perception and imagination of the river surpassed the set visual tropes under which the Yamuna has been subsumed since the past few decades. A common visual representation of the river has shown it to be froth-filled, specifically during Chath Pooja(a festival celebrated in India), and polluted and dirty during other times of the year. Images of this kind have presented a unitary character of the Yamuna. Historically, the Yamuna river has been subject to manifold representations in photography. The formal history has also seen the river as a symbol of settlement - occasionally romanticized into picturesque imagery and built up as a voyeuristic spot. In the latter half of the 20th century, the onset of industrialization on the banks of the Yamuna river, which has also been a drain to untreated sewage and other waste, led to the development of a new gaze which borrows from the social documentary tradition. This gaze’s contribution to the Yamuna river pertains to a unitary identity of the river. Around five years ago, I started making photographs with some seriousness. The medium’s paramount attraction was its unavoidable social referentiality, its way of describing - albeit in enigmatic, misleading, reductive and often superficial ways - a world of interconnected social references and relationships. And the problematic character of this descriptive power is compelling, complicated by the fact that the world that signals through images is one in which the photographer is already a social actor, never a completely innocent or objective bystander. To apply this idea to the Yamuna would mean that reportage photography is not so much a record of an event outside photography but merely a pictorial order (or presentation) matching generalized preconceptions of the river. As an image-maker in current times, my practices aren’t just involved making images but also reflecting on the afterlife of images. Hence my work is not just about photography - I try to speak from within, alongside and through images. More directly, my practice of making images may be called reflexive. This reflexive nature especially tries to contest the unitary representation of the Yamuna as a polluted river. Staging and collaboration become a vital part of my practices, giving an active role to the natural and human elements that make up the river’s ecosystem. Although my work is more reflexive than the traditional social documentary format, I am not particularly interested in cultivating an “individual style”. I am concerned in a world which looks at images (both historical and present) with sensitivity to materiality. “Only in Good taste” is about the river Yamuna in Delhi. The work also attempts to critically look at the act of photography, which carries an inherited tendency of representation by subverting the surface of the image. My first entry was an active response to the images of the polluted river. Soon, images of the Yamuna, overburdened with industrial waste and pollution began dominating our visual consumption, consequently becoming a cultural memory. This realism sought to brush traditional realism against the grain. This baggage of photography “capturing” life and life-like pictures has been an area of interest, personally, and points to the unitary character. My work deals directly with environmental pollution and crisis; it is a commentary and material interpretation of the current anthropocene age, in which the Yamuna river has been an important witness. Bearing this awareness in itself, this work mandatorily adopts an approach which is sensitive to the material aspect of image-making in order to generate meaning. I have tried to bring this materiality to the forefront through my set of tools for making the images. Thus, I wanted to make the river an active part of the project. I started experimenting with the chemistry of the darkroom process. I use the river water to make images by developing and printmaking techniques in the darkroom. I intended to incorporate these elements (materials) into my image-making process and debunk the popular imagery of the same. To put it simply, I started collecting the water of the river and the waste (which majorly consisted of polybags) from the Yamuna river. The collected polybags were taken and compressed in a compression moulding machine in a size of 4x5 inch film. These 4x5 inch films are then translated into darkroom prints using an enlarger (images 5 & 6). The water samples collected were taken to a water testing lab where processes were followed to identify and extract pollutant compounds in the water sample. Some heavy metals like iron, lead including phosphates and sulfates were found in the collected water samples. These pollutant compounds were separately collected and allowed to interact with a photographic negative sheet film physically. These sheet films were then stored and later translated into darkroom prints made using an enlarger. Some of the metal compounds like iron (image 7), magnesium (image 4) and lead (image 3) have been translated into prints using an enlarger in a darkroom. Apart from that, I have also translated a chemigram (image 2) and an already existing portrait damaged by corrosive chemicals (image 1) in the form of a darkroom print. Because the project was looking critically at the representational aspect of photography(the trope of the river) around the river, it was very important to step into the shoes of a surveyor and create images for survey purposes. These images are made solely for the purpose of surveys; apart from that, my intent is also to look at other research that has been done around the river and try to appropriate them with self-portraiture while replicating the aesthetic of a scientific manual (Image 9 - 12). The work goes into the aspects of verbatim documentary and the objective image-making process. The images made, various contemporary narratives around the river, the research data along with water samples and the self-portraits together form the work, which gives a holistic approach to looking at the river. The work has been divided into various propositions which take their own journey to present the proposed arguments of subversion and meaning-making. These propositions tap upon anthropocenic subject matter, with water pollution at its core, through image-making in a more material aspect. Video Reference : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1987VXcjjnVElLJ56OmKE_S_v1bs8xGj5