Since early morning, you can hear the cries of goats being sacrificed in Hyderabad, a city in India that celebrates the occasion of Eid-Ul-Adha with much prompt. Maybe it was because of this that I felt an urge to take my camera out of the shelf and explore the streets and the neighbourhood. In those moments, I was simply curious. Curious to know more of what happens, what people do here on this day; considering that I had moved to this city just a month ago. I chose to capture in monochrome, not for an aesthetic purpose but out of sheer instinct and a belief in the power of truth in black and white. 

 

After spending three hours around the place, I had few photos that I believed in, including some you see here. When I saw these photos again, I realized something. It was in those brutal moments when the goats were taken, sacrificed, cut and their meat diced that I didn’t feel any pain. Similarly, when I saw a family full of excitement over the festival and the children particularly excited over the dishes that would be prepared with the same meat, later that day; I could not feel anything. I neither felt a sense of sympathy for the goats nor happiness for the family. I could feel my presence in those photos as someone who had accepted and understood everything and put all her emotions into those milliseconds of the opening and closing of the shutter, entirely and unconsciously. And what was left in the end was an acknowledgement of a strange emptiness and lack of emotion in self. 

 

These photographs, that have been clicked as an account of the goats on Eid-Ul-Adha definitely remind me of the festival and its importance, but personally, they are a representation the process that took place in me, internally; before the photos were taken, the exact moments they came into existence and the later attempts at understanding them and myself inside those hues of black and white.

 

- Aditi Chandra