Sayali Goyal’s photographs and ways of seeing

There is beauty in the ordinary, and visual artist Sayali Goyal gives you 400 reasons to believe that. For seven years, she traversed the length and breadth of rural India, documenting its unique aesthetics, as seen in architecture, adornments, objects, colours, textures, patterns, typography, and people, of course. The result is ‘Everyday Indian Aesthetic’ (published by Roli Books), a photo book that is rich is colour, diversity and imagery, and yet emerges from the most routine stuff.

Educated at the University of Arts, London, Goyal finds art in the most unusual of places: a woman working the sewing machine with her feet; a scrap dealer’s stack of old suitcases and radios; a shopkeeper resting below vivid stacks of clothes; a weather-beaten lock; abandoned homes; kitschy art in homes and establishments; minimalistic borders and terrazzo flooring in a haveli; an antiquated switchboard; staircases, and the room underneath; man and wife somewhere in rural Punjab; a woman in a Shimla village…

If there is a bright montage of women’s earrings, there’s one telling their stories of desires, deprivation and diligence as showcased by photographs of their hands and feet. In one, men — through their slippers and jewellery — seem to nudge the viewers to take a sympathetic look at their lives, too. Railway platforms, crowded markets, empty shops, they all seem to be saying something. But what? Goyal leaves that to you to decipher as she decides to not caption her images, “a conscious choice to invite interpretations unhindered by any descriptive texts, and let the communication be infinite”.

Across the over 400 images contained in the book, what makes the usual unusual is the mundane act of seeing, but a mindful act of noticing what’s around. Now that’s something we have lost the knack for.