A Shot in Time

A shot in timeKARNA BASUIT is undeniable that photography bears a unique burden – that of accuraterepresentation – separating it from the other arts. One of the first issuesSusan Sontag tackles in her seminal treatise On Photography is ‘thepresumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest,seductiveness.’This burden of veracity weighs more in India than elsewhere and inparticular the developed countries. It stems from India’s crushing povertyand, more recently, unpalatable communal violence. A photographer in Indiacannot, with any degree of comfort, altogether ignore the country he livesin. And this is partly due to the flexibility of the medium itself – thefact that photography facilitates rich relationships between artist andenvironment and between environment and audience.Interestingly, photography shares an important similarity with the saffronbrigade – both thrive on diversity. But unlike the saffron brigade, whichderives its sustenance from combating India’s diversity, when a photographershoots the unfamiliar it is an act of embrace. A photograph finds elementsof interest in the most mundane. It can extract heterogeneity even when itseems there is none available. This is particularly true of artphotography – work that, if commercial or journalistic, is not primarily so.There is, therefore, an urgent need for it to enter the Indian mainstream.Traditionally, many among the steady stream of western photographerstackling India have fallen into the tempting trap of simplistic summarizingrather than incisive exploration. When the Swiss photographer Robert Frankpublished The Americans in 1959, he was commended (and derided) for, amongother reasons, suggesting that a collection of photographs could somehowencompass the essence of a country as varied as the United States. Similarspreads on India do not generate these reactions.There is a plethora of photography books with the simple but arrogant title‘India’, in which the country (and sometimes the subcontinent) is simplifiedinto a ‘sea of smiling faces’ or something of the sort. But Ayodhya is notAhmedabad, and Kashmir is not Kerala. Bengali legend has it that whenAlexander arrived in India through the Himalayas, he scanned the entirecountry with a sweep of his eyes and exclaimed, ‘Satya, Seleucus, kibichitra ei desh! (Honestly, Seleucus, how diverse this country is!)’ IfAlexander’s eyesight is to be trusted, careful studies along geographic andthematic lines must precede ‘definitive’ works on India.On the other hand, the Indian approach to India (through photography andfilm) has frequently rested on escapist fantasy rather than a confrontationwith reality. This in itself does not contradict the goals of art. Take, asan illustration, the studio photographs by Seydou Keita, the Malianphotographer. A quiet unassuming man, he refused to philosophize about hiswork, insisting that his goal was simply to make his clients look theirbest. Yet his beautiful photographs are full of empathy and infuse thefantasies of the photographed with great dignity. This tradition of studiophotography (and similarly, Bollywood cinema) is only natural in countrieslike Mali and India, where people need a diversion from the struggle oftheir daily lives.But such an atmosphere can stifle alternate approaches to the arts – thosethat might fulfil other social functions. Susan Sontag writes of China: ‘Theonly use the Chinese are allowed to make of their history is didactic: theirinterest in history is narrow, moralistic, deforming, uncurious.’ While inChina the government creates the obstacles to art, in India it is thegigantic, influential and homogenous popular culture that does the same.The relative paucity of audience interest, however, has not preventedcontemporary Indian photographers from creating a formidable, if small, bodyof work. Since the camera is a recent European innovation, it is onlynatural that these photographers should be partly influenced by theEuropeans who first brought the camera to India. Three photographers fromthe second half of the 19th century stand out as being particularlyinstrumental to the growth of the field in India – Felice Beato, SamuelBourne and Donald Macfarlane.Felice Beato was one of the world’s first ‘war photographers’. While mostcontemporary war photographers are anti-war, Beato was quite the opposite.One of his best known photographs, made in 1858, is entitled ‘Interior ofthe Secundra Bagh after the Slaughter of the 2,000 Rebels by the 93rdHighlanders and 4th Punjab Regiment. First attack of Sir Colin Campbell inNovember 1857, Lucknow.’ For this set-up photograph, Beato brought in humanskeletons and scattered them across the courtyard in front of thebullet-ridden walls. To add to the air of English glory, he threw in a fewdefeated looking Indian men standing languidly in the background. In hisessay on Beato, David Harris asks, ‘How does one reconcile the serenity andorder of this image with the graphic and repellent descriptions of fourhours of continuous slaughter…?’ Perhaps this is not possible, and one canonly hope that civilizational progress renders some artistic legacies dead(or, in our case, modified into the more benign culture of escapist studiophotography).Macfarlane and Bourne mark the advent of street photography in India. Thephotography historian Jane Ricketts writes that Macfarlane wanted to‘[discover] his personal vision of the picturesque in the superficiallyuninteresting surroundings of Calcutta.’ Indeed, his brilliant abstractionin ‘Rocks, Darjeeling’ and his depiction of neglected beauty in ‘Tolly’sNullah, Calcutta’ are refreshingly democratic and free of colonial hang-ups,reminiscent of Eugene Atget’s serene Paris streetscapes from the late 19thcentury. Bourne too had a fine eye for composition and was quite taken byIndia’s natural beauty. A master of understatement, he went so far as todeclare that the Ganga was a ‘not altogether unpicturesque object.’It took one more European to significantly influence modern Indianphotography – the Belgian master, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who made the firstof his several trips to India just after independence. He coined the term‘decisive moment’, an approach to street photography that would inspiregenerations of photographers across the world. Satyajit Ray described him as‘the greatest photographer of our time’ and attributed to him ‘the skill andvision that raise the ordinary and the ephemeral to a monumental level…’Cartier-Bresson achieved even greater brilliance when photographing eventsthat were themselves monumental – the aftermath of partition and theassassination of Mahatma Gandhi. There is the photograph of Nehru standingperched on the gates of Birla House, announcing to the anxious crowd thatMahatma Gandhi is indeed dead. A diffused light falls on Nehru’s face. Thepicture is slightly shaky. Completely unprepared for this event,Cartier-Bresson has tried to steady his camera by placing it on what lookslike the roof of a car.And in another photograph, we have Nehru in an altogether different mood.Standing between Edwina and Lord Mountbatten, he is doubling over withlaughter, his eyes on Edwina. The photograph is erotica at its finest andmost unexpected. I remember a scene from the documentary Three Women and aCamera, in which the photographer Homai Vyarawalla complains that she doesn’t like this photograph; it is undignified. That it may be, but we shouldthank Cartier-Bresson for allowing our prime minister’s undignified doingsto be fair game for a photographer. More importantly, the image ofCartier-Bresson roaming the streets of India, searching for the decisivemoment in the cities and villages, capturing the tragic optimism ofindependence, is an affirmation for the compatibility of photo-journalism,art, and high emotion in one package.In a country where so much meets the eye, the early practitioners of Indianart photography (working from the ’60s into the ’90s) readily took up wherethe Europeans left off, but this time tackling the ‘street’ on their own, inmore personal, terms. It is only very recently that a new trend towardsabstraction and introspection has emerged. Though it is difficult to make acomprehensive list of prominent names from the last 40-odd years, some thatcome to mind are Sheba Chhachi, Nemai Ghosh, Sunil Gupta, Sunil Janah, SamarJodha, Swapan Parekh, Ram Rahman, Raghu Rai, Sanjeev Saith, Dayanita Singh,Pamela Singh, Raghubir Singh and Homai Vyarawalla. Of these, three who aresure to leave behind strong artistic legacies are Raghu Rai, Dayanita Singhand Raghubir Singh. Not only are they extremely talented photographers, buttheir intimacy with the western art world will ensure that their work liveson in numerous well-produced books.I have heard stories from shopkeepers on Delhi’s Chandni Chowk about aphotographer who is regularly amongst them – sipping tea, making friends,and taking pictures. I like to believe it is Raghu Rai they are talkingabout. Rai is a member of Magnum, the most prominent photojournalisticagency in the world (co-founded by Cartier-Bresson and famous for warphotographers like Robert Capa and, more recently, James Nachtwey and GillesPeress). A large part of Rai’s work is in black and white and, more than anyother Indian, he has made an art out of photo journalism. His black andwhite pictures, which I think are his best, are grainy, full of contrast,and often dark. By doing away with the colour that is so integral to Indianlife, he ends up with sad and surreal landscapes.He has written, ‘People say that a good picture is worth a thousand words; Ifeel at times, a thousand words are a lot of noise, how about capturing somesilence?’ This silence is palpable in his 1965 photograph ‘Outskirts ofDelhi’, shot at dawn, which resembles a sprawling Japanese Zen garden withcows. Rai has extensively photographed old Delhi in all its faded splendourand has also completed portrait projects of both Mother Teresa and IndiraGandhi.Dayanita Singh has taken documentary photography out of the street and intohomes and communities. She had the courage (some say audacity) to photographher upper-middle class relatives and friends sitting smugly in their drawingrooms and looking jadedly into the camera. Her photographs insist that theupper-middle class belong to India as much as anyone else, and as if tostrengthen this claim, she has also built moving photographic collections ofhijras and prostitutes. Her most recent book, Myself Mona Ahmed, comprisesportraits of Mona Ahmed, a eunuch, spanning several years of her life. Byphotographing different classes of people separately and empathetically,Singh effectively highlights the unpleasant social demarcations that plagueIndia today.Raghubir Singh, until his premature death in 1998, was a prolific streetphotographer. He was a professed fan of Cartier-Bresson, but openly defiedhim by using colour. In Singh’s opinion, ‘Unlike those in the West, Indianshave always intuitively seen and controlled colour… The fundamentalcondition of the West is one of guilt, linked to death – from which black isinseparable. Psychological empathy with black is alien to India.’ This maybe an overstatement, but Singh’s photographs are unmistakably buoyed bycolour. His 1994 photograph, ‘Crawford Market, Mumbai’ displays his masteryover the decisive moment – a chaotic colourful marketplace, five strawbaskets balanced on five heads perfectly captured in mid-motion, one mandrinking water from a kettle, and another pouring tea into a cup (thisphotograph bears a striking resemblance to a 1966 shot of Jaipur byCartier-Bresson, and I suspect this may be Singh’s private homage to him).Elsewhere, Singh’s mastery over colour is useful in demonstrating the lackof it, for example, in a shot of a corpulent middle-aged man in a drearyBombay Dyeing office. One characteristic of Singh’s photography that setshim apart (for better or worse) is his framing. The borders of hisphotographs deliberately leave the viewer unsettled. Arms are cut off, neckssliced, and legs broken. Singh refuses to submit to the simple pleasures ofclean geometric framing and uncluttered straight lines.Of the more introspective photographers, I feel it is instructive to mentionSunil Gupta. The London-based photographer has addressed homosexuality inIndia through several collections of photographs. One of his early series,Exiles, contains portraits in quotidian urban settings that potently depictthe resounding clash between homosexuality and the Indian mainstream. Hislater series are more abstract and incorporate montage and multipleexposures. His work indicates an interesting shift in approach from themethods of street/portrait photography to more private musings throughabstraction. While doing so, however, Gupta avoids the trap of self-pity,and his sociological observations are all the stronger for it.John Szarkowski, a well-known photographer and art theorist, writes of ‘afundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think ofphotography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as amethod of exploration.’ A cruder way to put it would be to separatephotography into ‘introspective’ and ‘street’. Szarkowski himself admitsthat the boundaries of these categories are blurry and there is definiteoverlap. However, this distinction is useful, especially in the context ofthe maturing and diversifying of photography in India, as it allows us toascribe to each school a set of goals and benchmarks for evaluation.The task that the exploratory photographer sets for himself (rather, shouldset for himself) is not unlike that of the anthropologist. In apersonal/anthropological essay about the Marxists of Bengal, RamachandraGuha describes the three ‘births’ of an anthropologist, an idea heattributes to M. N. Srinivas. A ‘once-born’ anthropologist is eager to learnabout a tribe but is as yet unaccustomed to its ways. A ‘twice-born’anthropologist is one who has immersed herself in the ways of the tribe sheis studying – she sees from its point of view and is loyal to its members.And an anthropologist is ‘thrice-born’ when she is back in the university,ready to dissect what she has learned with an academic but sensitive eye. Atthe end of this three-tiered approach, ‘the allegiance to one’s tribe cannever be entirely abandoned, but now one can at least hope to achievepartial objectivity: the mark of a scholar, as distinct from a partisan.’Such an approach to exploratory, or street, photography will help thephotographer to bypass an ethical dilemma about partisanship discussed bySontag: ‘The history of photography discloses a long tradition ofambivalence about its capacity for partisanship: the taking of sides is feltto undermine its perennial assumption that all subjects have validity andinterest.’ Guha’s approach successfully separates the notions ofpartisanship and empathy.Szarkowski cites Alfred Stieglitz as the model for the introspectivephotographer, but Stieglitz’s approach to photography was arguably moreover-arching. Stieglitz, in the early 20th century, almost single-handedlybrought about a revolution in America’s perception of photography. He arguedeloquently for photography’s role as a vehicle of social change andcampaigned for an appreciation of its unique aesthetic potential. Hisenthusiasm for ‘equivalents’ is part of the reason Szarkowski names him as afather of modern introspective photography. An equivalent, in Stieglitz’swords, is a photograph that evokes feelings ‘about something other than thesubject of the photograph.’ Szarkowski adds that an equivalent is‘fundamentally romantic… and profoundly self-centred.’ Stieglitz’s definingcharacteristic, however, was his obsessive quest for beauty, which he evenimparted to students like Dorothy Norman (best known in India for herdelicate portraits of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi).Guha and Stieglitz help us to establish certain ideals – the first for theexploratory photographer and the second for art photographers in general.Against this backdrop, we can look at the specifics of photography in theIndian environment. Both Raghubir Singh and Raghu Rai have written about thepractice of photography in India. While their photographs betray theirdivergent approaches to street photography, it is also instructive to lookat their writing.Raghubir Singh has unambiguously stated his desire to celebrate the good inIndia, by highlighting what separates it from the West. To him, ‘Beauty,nature, humanism, and spirituality are the four cornerstones of thecontinuous culture of India.’ He writes about his travels across India withthe American photographer Lee Friedlander who ‘was often looking for theabject as subject.’ Singh argues that Friedlander’s approach of ‘beauty asseen in abjection’ is fundamentally western and suits neither him nor India.Raghu Rai, on the other hand, embraces black and white and is willing topaint a considerably grittier picture of India. While most pictures in Singh’s book on Calcutta, for example, are loud and boisterous, the inhabitantsof Rai’s equivalent book frequently look forlorn.Rai has written on the need for artistry and honesty in both art photographyand photojournalism. Like many photojournalists, he asserts that the notionof authorship is out of place in photography: ‘…when I am told that peoplecan distinguish my work from others, it is not very good, because it means Ihave imposed myself on the pictures so that traces of me can be seen.’ Onthis topic, Susan Sontag writes, ‘Insofar as photography is (or should be)about the world, the photographer counts for little, but insofar as it isthe instrument of intrepid, questioning, subjectivity, the photographer isall.’ This is an apt observation.The simple fact of Singh’s rejection of black and white and Rai’s successfuladoption of it asserts some notion of authorship. This is not at odds withRai’s concern for honesty, because honesty can accommodate subjectivity. Soif we are to acknowledge that the photographer must leave a mark on herphotographs, we must simultaneously reject Raghubir Singh’s claim thatcolour is better suited to the Indian psyche. It is the photographer’spsyche that counts. Colour could perhaps be defended on aesthetic grounds,but cannot on psychological grounds. Singh’s criticisms of both Friedlanderand black and white are unconvincing because he focuses more on aphotographer’s inclinations and the final product rather than on thesincerity of the process.Raghubir Singh was, however, correct to caution the Indian photographeragainst blindly aping the standards of the West. In particular, he said thatIndia is not ready for the individualistic introspection that is thetrademark of post-modern art. But this still leaves room for a collectiveintrospection through art, a dose of which the country sorely needs. Aphotographer should operate with the freedom to be pessimistic, the freedomto obsess over the unpleasant and the inhumane. Such an obsession does notindicate an aesthetic compromise.Sebastiao Salgado, the economist-turned-photographer, has spent a lifetimephotographing the world’s poor and dispossessed with an unflinching eye. Hisphotographs are proof that one can beautify sadness without glorifying it,that a photograph can be delectable yet damning. The journalist P. Sainath,who doesn’t consider himself a photographer but is in fact a rather goodone, takes pictures that also achieve this duality.Needless to say, the language of photography is accessible to the literateand illiterate alike. While a painting frequently loses its impact whenreproduced on a page, much less is lost in a good reproduction of aphotograph. So a photograph’s sphere of influence is potentially enormous. Iam sure that the photograph of Govinda in a Rupa ‘Frontline’ vest, asserting‘Yeh aram ka mamla hai’ has inspired many a man to sprint to the nearestbanyan store (myself included). To say that photographs are not capable ofinducing change in society would be to confuse photography with lack ofpublicity.Raghu Rai, for instance, has lamented the reluctance of popular publicationsto print controversial photographs (this problem is significant enough tomerit its own essay, so I shall leave it out of this one). The Govindaadvertisement is easy to publish because it generates no controversy otherthan, perhaps, some tension between those who wear VIP and those who wearRupa. Bengalis still swear by ‘Gopal Genji’, but that is a regional quirk.How can the potentially persuasive power of photographs be harnessed into acollective introspection? By allowing them to do what they do best –celebrate diversity, generate interest in the mundane, create empathy withthe voiceless. It would be foolish to require all photographers to share acommon agenda, but it is reasonable to expect them to be wary of infusingtheir work with an inaccurate optimism. If a photographer sees India’ssaffrons in shades of grey, then let it show in her work. If a photographersees in the spectrum of the population a spectrum of colours, then let thatshow in her work.Just as the English architect Herbert Baker went against Edwin Lutyens andthe prevailing disdain for Indian architecture by insisting on addingchhatris to the secretariat buildings in Delhi, let us hope thatphotographers have the courage to fight some of the prevailing wisdoms ofour times. If they achieve the beauty that Stieglitz envisioned, they arelikely to have an audience. And if the exploratory photographers among themfollow the methods that Guha promotes, then they may even mobilize thisaudience. Photographs are capable of moulding the relationship between anindividual and his society, and might therefore be instrumental inpreventing a society from imploding. At worst, they may shed some light onthe peculiarities of a country where L.K. Advani calmly watches the BabriMasjid going down while his daughter is safe in Paris, studying French.And occasionally, a photographer might find, in an unlikely place, a strandthat unexpectedly weaves through this giant population. Raghubir Singh’sposthumously published book, A Way Into India, does just that. It is a bookof pictures taken from and of the Ambassador car. To conclude, an excerptfrom his introductory essay about the car: ‘It is now a part of India’s longjourney. It is an organic part of bird shit and cow dung-coated India. It isthe good and the bad of India. It is a solid part of India that moves on,even as it falls apart, or lags behind. In its imperfection it is truly anIndian automobile.’