“What did we talk about, my dad and I? The different kinds of plyboard and woodworking joints, the correct way to change the bit of a drill and to hold and level and aim the gun of the welder, how to tell when a tyre has gone bald […]”
– Sara Baume, Handiwork, 2020
I have always been very curious about other people’s families. I cannot count the times while growing up that I witnessed my father ask newly-met strangers about their family history and genealogy. He would sit next to them and draw their family tree neatly on squared paper, using a red pen, a green pen, and a black pen to differentiate information: names, dates, and locations. Every name would be framed in a black rectangle and connected to the next. The family tree would then be gifted to his interlocutor. My father is a self-described “atypical engineer”: an enthusiastic man of many quirks who does not take himself too seriously. I suspect it is not by chance that, when I first stumbled upon The Sapper knowing nothing about the book or what it was about, it delighted me with intrigue.
All images from “The Sapper” by Bharat Sikka.
Published by FW:Books and developed between 2019 and 2023, The Sapper is the result of a four-year collaboration between the photographer Bharat Sikka and his father, Suresh Sikka, a former structural engineer for the Indian Army, responsible for, among other things, building and repairing roads and bridges, along with laying and clearing mines as well. The book is constructed with a variety of heterogeneous materials and photographic approaches: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, photocopies, collages, and photographs of framed photographs. A language of making and measuring and assembling, of building and testing structures — physical and photographic, ready-made and hand-made, relational and objectual — runs through the book and holds it together. The constructions we encounter range from bed cots balanced one against another, stencil rulers arranged to create a small structure on the wooden floor, a series of yellow parallelepipeds arranged over the remains of a wall in the landscape, to photographic constructions obtained through collage, such as a ladder with interrupted segments or a golden triangle in the middle of a deserted landscape. Unlike what one would expect from an engineer’s design, these objects lack any functional use and have no practical application in daily life; if they have no clear utilitarian purpose, their presence serves instead only as testimony to the joy of making, and most importantly, of making together. In this sense the constructions function more like sculptures that attest to careful attempts at finding balance, as most of them consist of objects balanced and counter-balanced against one another. A gift from engineer-father to photographer-son, the culminations of many days spent together at home and outdoors, responding to each other, responding to photographs, responding to the world. A generous dynamic of play and plan, plan and play.
In the book, constructions made by the father in the environment are photographed by the son and then responded to by the father through many collage and black and white photocopies he made, which in the book are printed on lighter, warmer paper. In one example we find an assembled collage with the silhouette of a man cut out of tracing paper with holes punched over the figure, which responds to one of the first portraits of the book in which we see Suresh’s back covered in little black, round, paper cut outs. The image is ambiguous, as the silhouette of the collage immediately calls to mind the man-shaped targets in shooting ranges, creating a tension between the playful process of punching paper holes and the violence of the shotgun wound. Elements such as this hint not only at Suresh’s military history (we also encounter a pile of army boots, an old photograph of a young Suresh wearing the army uniform, and a small model of an army vehicle) but also to the intricacies of the father-son relationship more generally. Despite the tenderness and playfulness that run through the book those intricacies and subtleties are never glided over. They emerge as one element among many in a careful game of balance and counterbalance, tension and looseness, negotiation and reconciliation.
Towards the end of the book we encounter a series of straightforward images of Sikka’s beautifully framed photographs. The frames are designed with an outer layer of wood that covers the photograph, cut out in different ways depending on the content of the picture, thus revealing or hiding certain areas of the image. Sometimes the process is inverted, and the picture itself is cut out in certain areas revealing the wooden panel placed underneath it. Whilst I found this material a little cryptic at first, repositioning my reading of the work as a series of responses between father and son helped me read the material differently. In this sense, the function of photographed frames is no different than that of any other photograph in the book: the father builds, the son photographs, the father makes collages, the son plans the frames, always responding to each other, always in conversation, always planning and measuring and playing. It is a type of conversation that spills beyond the specific photographic act to pervade all the other acts that make a practice. I stress the ongoing, generous working together of the two men because I do not think this work can be fully felt and understood otherwise. Four years of working together, of holding onto this mutual, tacit commitment, of holding space for each other, is a significant amount of time, particularly for a man who is now in his eighties (Suresh Sikka was born in 1938). Understood in this way, The Sapper presents a socially salient use of photography: an excuse to be together and discover each other through a completely new and surprising set of activities.
In the sequence of the book we are introduced to Suresh Sikka quite slowly. In the first photograph we see him in the distance as he walks out of the sea, bent over to keep his balance whilst walking on rocks — nothing but a little squiggle in the middle of the photograph. We get closer to him gradually, as we see him intent on interacting with different environments. When the portraits get close enough, his face is often hidden — by ‘eye-massaging’ spectacles, marble tiles, hoodies, blankets, dust, poles, the back of his head. Whilst there is a good amount of ‘spontaneous’, intimate material, in most photographs Suresh is a wonderful performer: we see him having a dance, acting in the landscape, interacting with materials — you can tell he is not being directed, and that instead he is expressing his own idiosyncrasies. The playful, eccentric qualities of this man emerge from the symphony of portraits, objects, still lifes, constructions and collages that make this book. Though the book reflects on the shared idea of the ‘father figure’ it never shifts into being primarily about an abstract father or about fatherhood in general, and instead it remains about a very specific man: Bharat’s father. In these movements between closeness and distance, these moments of revelation and concealment, we see the strength, the dignity and the autonomy of the man as well as the small vulnerabilities of aging. The world created in The Sapper is one that I always want to go back to, that never tires me as I ponder that central question — who is this man? Amongst all the closeness, consent, familiarity and play, it is a question that seems, to some degree, to still persist for Bharat Sikka as well. A book that stretches love across the ultimate unknowability of Otherhood.
