Feelings on Christian Ryan's Feeling

When I first lay my hands on Feeling, I must admit I was slightly disappointed.I was expecting something bigger, especially for the amount I paid and also because it was supposed to contain some unique unseen photographs by Patrick Eagar, arguably the greatest photographer of the sport.

Having finished it, I have a very different feeling about it. It’s not a conventional book at all. Even in its basic idea of talking to a photographer about photographs he took in one particular year is fairly unique. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, for the book will astonish you in many ways as you go along reading it.

It doesn’t have any index to begin with which you later realize isn’t much of an anomaly because there are no chapters. In fact, the book doesn’t follow a linear path. It digresses from time to time. Sometimes, we are told of Eagar’s time in Vietnam. Sometimes, the book gives us a peep into Eagar’s personal relationships with his father who once gave him out LBW where he stood as an umpire and even with his late wife. If the book was a person, I would have labelled it as a moody man. It’s like Ryan Christian never got around to edit on the first draft. Some might even feel cheated about their purchase.

But midway through the book, I parted ways with my frustrations and accepted Feeling as it is. I began to realize that feeling is such an apt title for a book that deserves to be felt, and not just read. Its first draft like feel makes it come across as raw, and gradually you begin to develop a taste for it.

In fact, it’s only fitting that the book is moody in its nature. After all, the subject of the book is a photographer who spent his life capturing images on a cricket field. A photographer on a cricket field, in my opinion, is the most involved and the least involved at the same time. He’s ever vigilant because he can’t afford to take his eyes off the game, lest he misses an important moment. At the same time, the pace of the game, especially in Eagar’s time, would allow a photographer’s mind to wander to far off lands. The book feels a bit like that and gets enjoyable as Eagar tries to put the reader in the photographer’s mind.

Through Eagar’s lens you see aspects of the game that you wouldn’t have hitherto noticed. One would probably need to sit behind the camera lens to understand Eagar’s lament about introduction of helmets, which in Ryan’s words ‘seal off expression, emotion’, something that hurt the photographer. Through Eagar’s lens and Ryan’s words, you see why photographs are special, especially in a sport like cricket.

"Capturing of live emotion is beyond TV’s powers. TV is OK at emotion in the aftermath, once a six is hit or a batsman is headed for the exit, but not during. TV is too slow and too fast. TV is too facile, panning for the next thing, the galloping-away ball, incurious about what has just been."

In his description of his captures, Eagar sounds exactly like a man who has spent hours and hours with his photographs who has seen them a thousand times and has seen in them a thousand things. He sees and shows the reader hitherto unseen aspects about the seemingly routine cricket pictures. It’s much more than giving context to a picture. It’s about looking at the picture and thinking about all the elements for hours and entering into their minds and their stories and then stitching one composite story in the picture to tell the reader.

The book thrives on a heavy dosage of nostalgia, of days when ‘cricket was cricket’ to borrow the title of another book of images by Adam Powley. An image of kids sitting on the grass banks and watching the action at Trent Bridge in 1975 with the old scoreboard acting as the backdrop is described by Ryan, “His photograph of kids watching feels like the last seconds before the fading world and the world that’s coming collide.”

My favorite bit about the book, however, remains the part where he touches upon the subject of death. Of death captured inadvertently by photos clicked preceding the event. Eagar uses a photo he clicked of Kiwi keeper, Ken Wadsworth, fifteen months before he perished to cancer and Ryan gives words to what Eagar thinks of them looking back. And there are not too many words, in fact. But the Wadsworth photo and Ryan’s words place the germ of the thought in your head which takes a life of its own. The life of a thought about death. That’s what photographs are capable of, a truth that grows bigger with every page turned in this wonderful wonderful book.