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8^th August 2020 – East Coast Road Chennai – seeing the sunrise with the gentle waves where my brother and I are being captured gazing towards the waves.

2023 March- East Coast Road Chennai – Seeing the rough waves above the sunrise accompanied by the final task of beach cleaning and the incoming of many people, thus a larger crowd.

April 2023 – Marina Beach Chennai – The Other side of the beach is marked with blurry lights that symbolise the life around it.

May 2024 – Kovalam Kerala – An attempt to capture the capturing of waves featuring my father taking a photograph on his smartphone.

May 2024- Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu – Multiple attempts to capture the Gaze of the same beach from different positions and times.

July 2024- A corn seller on the shore – The Beach providing livelihood.

Through the Photo  Text, I intend to capture Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida reference with the theme of The Beach – A symbol beyond the waves.

One can see from the above images that the Beach as a symbol, a concept that can be seen through multiple colours that show how it is a calm to rough concept and vice versa.

The Beach is a very happening place as the time frame from 2020 to 2024 shows how life around the Beach has changed. During COVID-19 times, we longed to get out of our homes and see the Beach, but now, after COVID-19, we tend to see the empty void beaming with life. To me, the Beach is a very important part of my life as it makes me a part of a whole. I long for it to be a part of me. The Calm and Rough waves of the Beach symbolise the highs and lows in my life, making such photographs exist in my life because nature, when captured in a photograph, creates an image even if the concept is missing the idea of relating nature to a larger culture, which indicates life, in the end, shows my intentions through the photographs.

The series of photos used here to tell individuals how one single idea of the Beach can be captured with or without the picture of the Beach as one needs to observe beyond the photographer’s intentions to enter into harmony to approve or disapprove of the studium and bring in the idea of punctum at least partially that will take the images beyond the intended meaning and leave room for the viewer to provide their meanings.

As stated in the earlier lines, multiple pieces are used here to arrive at a concept and theme that creates the whole where the time, year, place and people in the photographs matter.

Therefore, the Beach, in the end, at least to me, has a life of its own, which can be seen sometimes beyond the photographs mentioned above as it is etched in my memory when I close my eyes.

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Abhipsa Munsi is a student of Shiv Nadar University in the Department of Sociology. Beyond academics, she is an enthusiastic writer and poet, expressing her thoughts and observations through written words. She believes that her love for East Asian dramas and webtoons complements her sociological interests, offering diverse cultural perspectives.