Love in the time of Tinder: An Indian photographer explores the relationships people form online

Visitors to this year’s annual photography festival in southern France, the Rencontres d’Arles, will have close access to photographer Chandan Gomes’ private world. In a simulation of the artist’s bedroom back home in Delhi, a chair and a desk containing Gomes’ personal belongings – his laptop, a small pocket diary, current reading material, a wristwatch, earphones, coffee sachets and painkillers – will be set up at Ground Control, a bar, one of the 30-odd venues of the festival.

The space will showcase 10 exhibitions, all of which have been shortlisted for the New Discovery Award – to be announced on July 7 – and Gomes’ is the only work from India to be included as part of the main prints section at the festival. Alongside objects from the artist’s everyday life, his installation will comprise 36 archival prints, together titled People You May Know.

Imperfect strangers

The project, as Gomes describes over an email exchange, is “a bricolage” of photographs, objects and conversations with a stranger/friend called Tara Banerjee – he met her via Facebook in 2016, but is still to meet in person. His laptop screen – a meeting point for the two protagonists of his story – also becomes a workstation for Gomes by night, on which he collates and photographs various snatches from their interactions on Facebook and Skype.

The pigment prints of these photos have been mounted on special aluminium dibond sheets – each fitted with a channel on the back, meant to give viewers an experience akin to that of a fluid, digital screen. In this world of make-believe, Gomes lets us in, into his other virtual world. A reality that for him, is often more real than his encounters offline.

As curator of the show, gallerist Devika Daulet-Singh reflects in her note on the work: “As the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds get blurred, the phenomenon of the digitised self finds agency and freedom to be anybody it wants to be.” The power of anonymity comes through strongly in the string of messages where Gomes keeps repeating, “Who are you?” only to be met with Tara’s whimsical replies.

People You May Know, which might come across as a purely narcissistic endeavour on one level, is completely relatable on another. You cannot help but recall the last person with whom you had a strange virtual conversation. And it hits home – many of us have been there, even if it was 20 years ago, when chat rooms were the rage in India. Facebook today is a more “complex iteration” of the same, in Gomes’ estimation. Everyone is a part of this quasi world, seeking love, affection, friendship and comfort from a name blinking on and off in an electronic void.

Gomes, as documenter and central character, becomes both the outsider looking in and vice versa. While, on one hand, he explores his inner self, on the other, he represents a larger voice, one that belongs to those whose accounts might be startlingly similar to his own. Gomes’ role as the artist comes to the fore, as he starts questioning the implications of this new age relationship on not just his personal life but on society as a whole. “It is a visual document of the intimacies we share, coupled with a sense of distrust and irony,” said Gomes. “Most of us live in this paradox in context of our real and virtual selves. Tara might not exist outside Facebook, or outside Facebook she might not be (the) Tara I know. Who knows? I certainly don’t and that’s why I am on this quest.”

“Its unpredictable and non-linear narrative allows the viewer to experience a relationship as it unfolds, falters, and rebuilds, not always in the same order,” said Daulet-Singh of the project, which she sees as “a dark and poignant search for romantic love in the digital age”. How different really is love in the real world from this? Aren’t all relationships, whether virtual or otherwise, unpredictable and non-linear in their narrative, if there ever was one to be documented?

Sorrow, sexuality, quirks and adventure – Gomes’ archives explore a range of emotions, where the ease of technology makes sharing ideas a quick and almost tactile venture. A graphic collage of Tara’s nude body in parts or a drawing of Almorah that she shared with Gomes, egging him to come join her, is the new language of love, which replaces handwritten letters and carefully-chosen gifts with the luxury of immediacy. Gomes uses stills from movies Tara and he might have discussed, to share his own insights into the relationship.

In a touching excerpt, he compares his desperation of finding Tara to that of Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show in which Carrey, oblivious to the artificiality of his life and relationships – all part of a reality show – falls in love with the wrong woman. With her forced exit from the show, he spends years helplessly piecing her together from memory, with cut-outs of faces from magazines. Gomes, in his montages, is also trying to put Tara together, “inch by inch”.

There is something to be said about the design element in Gomes’ work. A wide shot of a grid in which names and profile images of people on his Facebook list and those suggested by it appear in little tabs, one is reminded of uniform government housing where all the homes merge into one anonymous, loveless lot. Each name beyond that homogenising gridlock is an individual entity, one different from the next. Getting to know anyone is just a click away, or so you’re told. Most people you think you know from tracking their online activity. But perhaps the question to dwell upon would be – do you really know them, or would you ever, really?

People You May Know is showing at Rencontres d’Arles, France, from July 2 to September 23.