“Neither silent nor audible":  Finding Delhi in Pablo López's The Ridge

Priyam Goswami Choudhury, University of Potsdam

Pablo López’s photos from New Delhi, collected in his first publication titled The Ridge, is a project that breathes within the silence of a city that is always in the act of transforming itself. It is always, as Berger once said, “[n]either silent nor audible”. López’s photographs interlace the seven cities of Dilli in a collection, that bring out the gaps—both poetic and awkward—in reading the history of the nation in the history of this city. “Delhi might not be full of silence, but… somehow I feel that it is surrounded by it”, López confessed to me in a short text from India this spring, where he was back at his work documenting the northern ridge in Delhi.

In this presentation where I will be previewing a way of seeing his photographs of Delhi, I want to reflect upon these gaps and these silences, walking with and via poets, writers and essayists like John Berger, Arvind K. Mehrotra, and Agha Shahid Ali to think about the histories that are captured in the photographs of cities and the ones that linger within and without the frame.

Priyam Goswami Choudhury is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik at Universität Potsdam. Her academic work concerns tea, literature, popular culture, and colonial ecologies. Her poetry has been published in places like Rattle, electica, The Bombay Lit Magazine, and is forthcoming in an anthology of poems about Indian cities.