Devotion Through the Arch

I arrived at the Taj Mahal complex before sunrise on a morning when the river fog had turned everything beyond the main gate into a white abstraction. The monument was there but not there, a suggestion of domes and minarets dissolving into vapour. I positioned myself deep inside the entry pavilion, where the carved sandstone arch frames the mausoleum like a proscenium, and I waited for the light to find its angle.

The dancer appeared without announcement. She had come with a film crew that had not yet set up, and in the gap between their arrival and the beginning of their schedule she began to move. Arms extended, dress catching the draft from the open archway, her silhouette became the foreground subject that the composition needed. Without her the frame is a postcard. With her it becomes a conversation between human gesture and imperial architecture, between a body that is here for a moment and a building that was built to outlast all bodies.

I keep this image because it sits at the intersection of two concerns that run through my entire practice: the scale of architecture against the scale of the human form, and the tension between permanence and transience. The Taj Mahal was built as a monument to grief, to the idea that love could be made permanent in marble. The dancer is the opposite of permanence. She is motion, breath, a shape that existed for less than a second. This frame holds them both, and neither diminishes the other.