Visual Philosophy

Mainak: Hi! My name is Mainak Bose and I’m a photographer based in Kolkata, India. I enjoy travelling and taking pictures whenever I can, but I also equally enjoy being in my room and editing all the pictures I have taken over the years. This is all a hobby for me though and that’s how it always will be. I do work a 9-5 as a main job which I also enjoy (weird I know). Hence I don’t have any intentions of monetizing any of the art I make. I’m happy to give it away to people that want to use it for any reason. And I will continue to do so for as long as I’m still making art.

Can you share the process of creating your images?

Mainak: I mostly like creating composites where I’m combining 2 or more pictures into 1. So the process of creation mostly comes down to figuring out if the pictures that I’m trying to combine can be combined in the first place and then figuring out how to do it. Sometimes I’ll just use Photoshop to adjust the blending modes on the pictures and it turns out to be a quick edit. But most of the time, it takes a while. I adjust colours on individual pictures, blur them individually or just do whatever I feel like on Photoshop to find a way to get the picture that I have in my mind. It can be a fun process if it all comes together but that does not always happen. So I just keep trying. I also only use pictures that I have taken while editing. It’s more fun to work on taking better pictures to use later than to find the right stock images on the internet.

Where do you draw your ideas from?

Mainak: There are so many sources. Fellow artists on Instagram, whatever my Pinterest feed shows me, any movie, TV show, music video or anime that tries to do something interesting with shot composition and colour grading. A lot of video games have given me ideas too. Basically anything that is visual in nature and appeals to me aesthetically, I want to try and replicate it, combine it with other stuff and hopefully give it a unique spin.