ABSTRACT
In 2005, the Delhi-based artist Atul Bhalla released fourteen photographs of his own daring submersion within the city’s sacred river: the Yamuna, close to Jagatpuri, where that river becomes highly polluted and profaned by the raw sewage and the industrial waste emanating from nearby urban areas (Figure 3.1). While the digital photographs immediately foreground the steady steeping of Bhalla’s body, from above the torso to the tip of his head, into the brine of the river, the relative placidity of the river itself serves to draw the viewers’ attention to the lower portion of the frame. Here, as one discerns Bhalla’s head and sinking torso mirrored in the somewhat tranquil water of the river, one feels obliged to wonder if he is as much his own reflected counterpart in the water, as he is a body that casts the reflections.2
