Jason Oddy Layout

Varanasi is a twelve-part photographic work showing the River Ganges. Depicting the same view of this sacred place at regular intervals over a 24-hour period this meditation on impermanence and change is an attempt to make visible Heraclitus’s famous dictum, ‘You can never step in the same river twice.’

Although Varanasi borders on abstraction close scrutiny reveals these tripartite images of sky, land and water to be upside down. Oddy uses a large format 5×4 inch camera in whose viewfinder everything appears inverted. Through highlighting the materiality of this process the work asks us to perceive things as they really are, simultaneously suggesting how this most redemptive of rivers might help us see the world anew.