Photo Essay | Ontology of Stairways: Syncretism of Reverie and Memory

Our day-to-day mundane interactions with stairways could not possibly clue us into their embodiment of deep, emotional reserves. Stairs are the symbolic spine of a house; one of the most potent images of architecture that possess an array of metaphoric and symbolic connotations — the reason for them being used as a powerful symbol in art.

Stairways are passages from above to below, from the earth to the sky, from the public to the private, and they seek to unite any two things, places, ideas or states of being.

You could also associate vertigo and getting lost with them and, thus, stairways can elicit thoughts and emotions of fear and anxiety if they are unaccustomed.

However, some stairways are inscribed in us, becoming our organic habits. However many stairways we may have climbed, we would recapture the reflexes of the first stairway, the more familiar one. We would not stumble on that rather ascend high-stepping.

The intermediate landing, which allows stairs to change directions, is often a platform for eavesdropping, or the sites where we can practice what Baudelaire, a French poet called the art of “fertile laziness” (la paresse feconde).

The current avaricious culture has turned our spaces into mere objects of utility devoid of any mythopoetic content and sans any oneirism.

This photo series is an attempt to reimage stairways in ways that make the onlooker eager to investigate the ecstasy of the newness of the image.

Stairways – an intuitive design probably inspired from formations of the natural world and the inherent ability of humans to climb.

A straightforward staircase suggests an uncomplicated route. Conversely, a spiral, twisted staircase may suggest mystery and disorientation. But what do you make of the one that’s the amalgamation of both?

Stairways that are the sole relics of an intimacy that is ‘consentingly desecrated’.

Stairways that delude us into believing that there certainly must exist a ‘stairway to heaven’.

Stairways that open up to roads nonchalantly abutting graveyards.

Stairways that are too gaudy to provide a substantial scope for imagination.

Stairways that corroborate the gracefulness of curves and inflexibility of angles.

Stairways that are just the size of the verse ‘The serpent beguiled me and I did eat’

Stairways to shrines that are accessible only after traversing hopes tied in knots on trellised gates.

Stairways to a mound of rubble that once was somebody’s home

Wobbly stairways that have the propensity to catapult you in Shakespearean Dilemmas.