These articles are posted here for public archiving as possibly important sidelights to a fascinating period of suddenly enhanced activity in Delhi (India) with regard to creative photography in the early 1990s. I like to think I was also instrumental in actually setting the whole snowball rolling with a couple of shows I did at the time (see 'Milestones' & 'In Search of the Avant Garde' in the Exhibitions & Events page). At any rate, this was close to the period of the First Iraq War, when there were also new issues of the visual media at war arising, some aspects of which balooned more fully into public conciousness by the time of the Second Iraq War (2003), thereby perhaps making my various comments scatterred through these texts here and there perhaps valid once again.

With regard to the seeming assault by me upon certain of my colleagues at the time in these texts, the fuller story of that can also be reviewed in the stories of 'Milestones' and 'In Search of the Avant Garde' in my Exhibitions & Events page.

(for the record: I also did a weekly column of 'How To' articles on photography for the Sunday color-magazine supplement of a different newspaper a few years earlier to this)

Using the lens only to record
(The Times of India, New Delhi, June 2, 1992)
~

MAATI ­ Born from the Earth, this is how Haku Shah titled his show of photographs. There's a hint at double significance in this name, for the term 'Maati' ­ generally taken to mean earth in India ­ can be seen also to refer to 'the flesh' in Gujarat. The exhibition was divided conceptually into the course of a lifecycle with sections of Birth/ Fertility/ Life/ Celebration and Death/ Ancestor Rituals. There was a section of portraits too. The subject matter is basically lifestyle, art forms (especially terracotta) and traditions of some fascinating communities in the tribal belts of Gujarat, on whom Haku Shah is a renowned authority.

Though styled an Exhibition of Photographs, here we have the documentarist triumphing over the photographer. The pictures are obviously not intended to be seen as independent entities, but rather as vehicles supporting the communication of specific information.

There has been a debate on for many months now, about the correct character and quality to be expected from documentary photography, and about the responsibilities that must guide professional photographers active in this stream of the medium. The question that then immediately arises here is, what can we say of the researcher who uses the medium to record his documentation, with little apparent concern for the independent aesthetic quality of the pictures. There is a rider to this too, in a reiteration of the importance of context, for Haku Shah's pictures have been used together with substantial texts in numerous books and publication to great effect.

The apparent variation between the strength of the exhibit and the strength of the same material in a contextually relevant book may, however, be influenced by the fact that the show seems to be put together from leftovers of previous exhibits with clear variations in content, quality, format and presentation, Given that the exhibit coincided with the release of a very substantial, and handsome, related publication, one would have wished the prints to have worn a fresher look. More so because we're also talking about a very outstanding personal record here.

Painter-designer Haku Shah is recognized as an eminent authority on Indian folk and tribal art. When he curated an exhibit of Indian tribal artifacts through the USA in 1969, under the direction of Dr. Stella Cramrisch, he participated in the first exercise at opening out Indian folk-art awareness to the world. Not surprisingly, he soon had a Nehru Fellowship with which he spent two-years, 1971-73, studying certain folk-art forms of Gujarat. In the process he shot 20,000 pictures, of which this show is a representation.

Talking of photography, we are faced with straightforward problems. Most of the prints are old and have outlived their acceptability in an exhibition of photographs. The format is fractured in terms of frame-size, presentation, quality and character, without any apparent redeeming factor. Too much shooting down at people on stools, or their haunches. Too much out-focus. And, considering that we are well into the 1990's, surely documentation should include colour. The shifts between sepia and black-and-white prints force one to contrast the two, by which the former suffers a loss of strength.

But none of this is an indictment of Haku Shah. His documentation is profound and has earned him an international credibility. In fact he is just recently back from a stint as Regent Professor at Davis, California, USA. He's got the Padma Shri, and recognition from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and of course, the Nehru Fellowship. He is the author of several publications.

Equipment was not so user-friendly those days. In contemporary photography too, he was a pioneer.

Poor Portrayal of Pristine People
(The Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, September 13, 1992)

Hallelujah, my humiliation as an Indian photographer is complete! I got my first glimpse of what is proudly held in the sci-fi archives of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, and it was crowned with an Italian diplomat! Perhaps one must strive that much harder to break into the buddy-system of our cultural Valhalla if one wants a Government of India boost to one's work or, as in this case, one's hobby.

That being a foreigner undoubtedly helps was amply demonstrated in Delhi recently by a Belgian employee of Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His draft for a film on the Rani of Jhansi was on the front page and half the culture-page of at least one mainstream national daily. Hey! At the last count we were about 850 million of us out here. You want drafts and hobbies? Lord, why didn't you say so?

But seriously, Dr. Francesco d'Orazi Flavoni's photographs on the Rabaris of Kutch are very pretty in the exhibition presented by the IGNCA and the Indian International Centre. A nine-year fascination and plodding commitment are utilized here. Lovely frames, and lovely masking with mountboard. The prints are small, which will hopefully set a trend, and by and large they are of reasonably good quality, although just a touch less than professional in some instances. Plenty of good portraiture with some real goodies in black and white, and so on and so forth. Ultimately however, we have to view the entire scenario with the country's most pampered Arts Centre at the center of the web.

The IGNCA has simultaneously published a book of Flavoni's work, and while allowing that the work has suffered in reproduction, and the format separating copy matter from photographs is ridiculous, it must be said that the production is ghastly. We have been exposed to a severely limited vision. The pictures just go on and on without ever getting anywhere. It is the classic tourist fascination with the overview, in the process never getting down to detail or latitude of information. Too few clues to the environment, seasons, vegetation, wildlife, topography, farm-produce, craft, the people's livelihood, food, tools, utensils, jewellery. A single photograph of two tattooed hands gets out of this bind with a few other weak images, but the whole does not add up to a photo-documentation of the Rabaris. And severe editing would have to precede a presentation of this material as just photography.

With public money on the line, it may perhaps have been better to scrap the book and instead fund an Indian photographer to spend time addressing a comprehensive photo-brief. The medium, as very ably demonstrated by the good doctor, is entirely in the public domain today. And if our various cultural institutions do not develop a clarity of thought, they will soon be swamped by the dead stock of 'good-photography', archiving which is rather more than an intimidating prospect. Qualifying this exercise with the phrase. 'Through a photographer's eye' seems to pass the burden of responsibility to Flavoni. But that is not acceptable since the material was before the IGNCA.

Further, if justified in itself, the book should not have been limited to Falvoni's work. Judy Frater of the USA, to take but one example, has spent several years documenting the Rabari's textile traditions and way of life. I have no count of the numerous Indian photographers who most definitely have substantial good quality material on the region.

Perhaps one would have been more comfortable if Flavoni himself had presented the exhibition. But, being a seasoned diplomat, he probably recognized the irrationality of IGNCA's adulation. Which would explain why he didn't make the short trip from his new posting in Pakistan for the opening. To a layman like myself, it is a transparent carry over of the colonial kowtow of our brown-sahibs and memsahibs.

One last point, about the curator's statement at the opening. The case for 'Pristine' lifestyles we should learn from has been rather overdone of late. So it is opportune that we can, this time, view its usage in a clear context. The pictures offer few clues to the lifestyle of the Rabaris unless they spend a lot of time being photographed. Also, earlier generations and the lifestyle of any people have always left ecological clues. In the case of the Rabaris, we know that Kutch is an environmentally devastated province.

A lensman's tryst with history
(The Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, October 18, 1992)

He liked being referred to as the "historian with a camera", but modestly coined the term "photo-journalist" for himself and so many others that have followed him. Today, the former term is so much more apt for Erich Salomon's life as a photographer, and his ultimate fate speaks a poignant tale in the annals of the most important medium to have emerged in the last two centuries.

"There was scarcely a big international conference or important gathering at which I had not at least one friend at court. And a trusted accomplice is the first, invaluable asset for this work," he was wont to remark. But not too long after he said this, Erich Salomon began perforce to wear the damning mark of the Yellow Star as a prelude to his final journey to the death-camp called Aushwitz, circa 1944.

Photography was still young in Salomon's days, partly because the lengthy exposures had petrified much of photographic practice into contesting ­or aspiring to reach the level of­ the art of painting! There was plenty of justification for this because photography then required a very great effort to practice. Perhaps it helped that Salomon came to the medium relatively late in life ­ at 42 ­ and was thus more confident and mature. He was committed to public interest rather than to the practice of photography as an 'art form.'

The first step was to adapt, what was in those days, an unacceptably small film size. The gadget-freak that exists in all photographers even today, made Salomon assemble his own special kit: small film for small cameras, big lenses to dispense with flash, quieter add-on shutters, and the uninhibited ­sometimes even hilarious­ use of subterfuge to get where he wanted and gather the pictures he sought. With cameras looking out of hats, briefcases, arm-slings and what have you, in an age when 'good-photography' required a lengthy and formal ritual with bulky large-format cameras on tripods, it is not surprising that Salomon's technique gave rise to the term 'candid camera'. It is however surprising that Salomon often achieved equally candid results with two Leicas on a tall shiny tripod, so that he was dubbed with epithets like "Houdini of Photography", the "Master of Indiscretion" and even the "Invisible Cameraman". There is a naiveté towards the medium on the part of his subjects that is today entirely lost. The politicians were caught off-guard in private moments, and yet enjoyed having been focused upon to the extent that Dr. Otto Braun, the Prussian Prime Minister was reported to have remarked: "Nowadays, you can hold a conference without ministers, but not without Dr. Salomon."

That was 55 years ago. Today photojournalism mostly implies practicing among a host of colleagues in a cordoned-off area at what is brazenly referred to as a "Photo-Opportunity." The patterns are before all of us: the handshake, the shared podium, the portrait with spouses, the easy camaraderie in the big-guns' living room corner. That's how it works, be it with politicians, or, across the spectrum of the lens, film stars.

A case may be made that the sum total of such activity is a huge illusion that is negotiated between photographer, editors and subjects, as epitomized in the gratuitously flattering exclusives that emerge out of such "photo-sessions". And for the "good work" done, the political photojournalists gets his government apartment, political junkets, goodwill giveaways, free meals and ­believe it or not­ anything from booze, clothes, shoes and watches to even more equipment!

The problem today is compounded by selective accessibility and the high cost of the medium in an age of auto-everything equipment. A tacit negotiation has to be entered into by the photographer or he is out, and in comes the next man with the auto-everythings. News media is voracious. It should worry us, for example, that anybody at all agreed to the restrictions on the media during the Gulf War. It would seem that there was the same "Photo Opportunity" arrangement agreed to and the resulting coverage was the same brand of biased and selective images of reality as recorded history.

There can be no judgment of good or bad on the matter, but the concept itself should worry us. The next logical step, which has so sadly been disregarded by all of us, is before all in Punjab. On the basis of a code of conduct all journalists in Punjab must toe the Government line or risk being arrested under the Terrorists and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) or the National Security Act (NSA). The Supreme Court very laudably threw out a government proposal for a similar "Policy" on judges.

The Historian with a Camera survived at a time when it was conducive for him to do so. But when the order changed, when he became "the Jew Salomon", it was necessary for him to die, so he was killed. The Houdini of Photography, while witnessing both, recorded the old order and left us nothing of the new. In his stead, Erna Ledvai Dinksen and others were put to work on photographic racial-propaganda. In the order that bolstered the "Final Solution", Salomon was the obvious victim. He had inadvertently become the first puppet photo-journalist, and will not be the last. Stalin would have been delighted: after all, he named it "Socialist Realism", and based the old Soviet Cultural policy on the concept.

Something is wrong with this state of "all's well"
(The Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, October 25, 1992 ) ~ Diwali!
~

Perhaps it is just as well that an error slipped into my piece last Sunday on the Erich Salomon exhibition. I had not suggested that a proposal for a policy on photography had received the consideration of the Supreme Court. Rather that, in the light of the draconian code of conduct for the media in Punjab, it was laudable that the court had thrown out a proposal for a code of conduct to be imposed on members of the judiciary.

In the context of such assaults on the freedoms of certain professions, we should carefully think upon the ramifications of accepting any official Cultural Policy. Especially since it includes a proposal for a Policy on Photography cobbled together by a powerful lobby of photographers whose work entails a close and longstanding liaison with the powers-that-be.

Four simultaneous shows of photography ­with one commissioned by Raghu Rai­ is unprecedented in the Capital and speaks well of the state of the art in India. An analysis is however inevitable, so let us scrutinize the recent pointers for a deeper discussion on the matter.

In July last year, there was a hullabaloo when an exhibition of Indian photography curated by two little known (in India at least) German photographers was not included in the Festival of India. Without looking into the validity of a German perception of Indian photography, the Culture Secretary was forced to retreat. A good sum of public money was offered for a national seminar on photography while the placatory gesture of commissioning the National Centre for Photography as an Art (NCPA) to curate an acceptable substitute show was rejected as so much dross.

The seminar was staged last February under the aegis of a new society called the Forum for Contemporary Photographers (FCP) who seem to institutionalize the aberration that our news­photographers are considered to be our finest creative practitioners. The very nature of the genre should however make for a substantial abdication of creative autonomy. News and social landscape are perhaps the only photographic fora restricted to so-called inherent limitations of the medium, for they pose as reality. Not surprisingly then, the proposal for a Policy on Photography that emerged from the seminar essentially comprised an assault on creative autonomy with elastic terms couched in the three basic clauses. It had to be taken seriously, for the members of the forum were among the foremost news-photographers of the day, with Raghu Rai as the chairman.

The new hierarchy sought to be institutionalized was made quite clear with a list of "Photographers Who Could Not Attend" appended to the list of those who did, along with a few advertising photographers, and one of wildlife. Komal Anand, representing the Department of Culture, excitedly crowed that "the possibilities are immense because now the photographers would have a joint voice". N. S. Ratan, of Punjab's Department of Culture, whose presence was unexplained, set a finer focus in suggesting that now something special could be done "so that the idea, in the minds of the people sitting away from Punjab that it is only a land of blood and bullets and nothing else, should be removed." The Forum obliged by immediately declaring their first project to be Project Punjab, since the FCP members are all "concerned photographers", fully conscious of the positive role they have to play socially.

As things turned out, the negotiations between our concerned photographers and the government seem to be well progressed, for the FCP chairman was appointed commissioner of a large state-sponsored photo-exhibition, "My Land, My People", that was incorporated into the current SAARC festival. The commissioner, in an ICCR invitation to photographers, indicated that all entries were to be limited in size and restricted to black and white, but were nevertheless expected to be "creative, vibrant and fresh images dealing with the subject-matter in a broader vision, avoiding the usual clichéd images." And so to the exhibitions.

Erich Salomon, witness to the rarified airs of elegant European political highjinks and the low realities of Auschwitz, was represented with pictures from only the former (as the "Historian with a Camera"). Institutional reality number 1, perpetrated by Max Mueller Bhavan. The Japanese People, presented by the Japan Foundation, sums up the second institutional reality: between work and play all is tame in Japan. My Land, My People: Commissioned by Raghu Rai under the aegis of the ICCR, with the message that all is well with us in South Asia. The third institutional reality.

The fourth exhibition is the most revealing by implication, although this too is an institutional product of sorts, courtesy the Brazilian Embassy. Zeca Guimaraes of Brazil shows the finest from 22 years of work making clear that the practice of photojournalism and social landscape is essentially a peculiar dance of stillness, parasitical upon people, places and events big and small, that actually serves no clear function. The point to be noted is that his short sojourn in India has already produced images that are a match for almost every Indian photographer represented in the ICCR show.

It is entirely justified that institutional activity should present the best face of the country to the world. But can the autonomous contributors to the resultant selective reality then wear the holier-than-thou mantle of concerned individuals? The net result, after all, entirely excludes radical images, leaving us with good pictures, yes, but little else.

It must be said that Raghu Rai was the finest Indian photographer to emerge from the '70s. But that in no way qualifies him to be the sole guiding-light for Indian photography through the '90's. On one hand he has expressed a strong belief that "your creative energy and mine when shared in good faith and understanding has power like nuclear fusion, liberating ourselves from our own frame, our own prison." On the other, he has this year taken a strong stand against creative autonomy, created a meaningless photographic montage with public money, sought to stand in judgement over his peers, and broadcast a boycott of Lalit Kala's projected second Biennale of Photography on the basis that they have been "contacting photographers on their own, whose styles and practice of photography is uncertain.." We are, in effect, to liberate ourselves from our own frame, our own prison, and limit ourselves to his.

All this may seem to add up to an assault on the photographers represented in the ICCR show, So to correct this perception we must compliment the only ladies represented, Dayanita Singh and Ketaki Seth, who displayed a mastery of the "Decisive Moment". Sondeep Shankar's excellence was marred by the scattering of his contribution. This scattering however disguised Nitin Rai's blatant exploitation of a man who had the misfortune of being born a dwarf. Ajit Kumar deserves a special commendation for his contribution addressing the first half of the exhibition theme.

As for the other SAARC countries and Japan, photography is extremely culture-specific in the practice of social-landscape, so one is not really qualified to comment. However, an arresting image with paan and a hand, found in the Bangladesh catalogue, makes a profound statement on Bangladeshi culture, and its absence in the actual exhibition is an indictment of the commissioner.

The Japanese show, being just upstairs from the SAARC show drew a clean contrast between the potential exuberance of the photographic medium and the regimented approach of our state-sponsored reiteration of an "Ancient Culture". Perhaps we need to be a little up to date and catch up with a world that has left us far behind like an excess of fossils.

It would all seem to lend credence to the American philosopher Susan Sontag's contention that various concerns have inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations in order to document "a hidden reality,.. that is, a reality hidden from them."

Cliched image, distorted lens
(The Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, December 13, 1992)

It should be obvious by now that photography in India is going through a catharsis. It is significant that the two most well-received photography shows in Delhi this year have been of a foreign photographer focusing on India, and an Indian chartered accountant serving the tourist trade!

As the eminent photographer and photo-analyst Satish Sharma has said in various fora, what we have here is a Pandora's box that urgently needs to be focused upon. Take the high profile show of Henri Cartier Bresson for example. Bresson is repeatedly referred to as the model for inspiration and emulation in much of modern Indian photographic practice. This has reached the level where our premier national arts institutions, the IGNCA and National Gallery of Modern Art have collaborated to raise his work on India to the status of visual icons.

Now, Bresson emerged as a model in the photographic scene at least 30 years ago, and surely today we should be viewing the results of that inspiration. Besides even the photographs on show have been freely available in the book "Henri Cartier Bresson in India," published by Mapin from Ahmedabad. And the hallowed original prints so solemnly hung in the NGMA are no more special than what is held in the archives and collections of at least a dozen North American colleges and innumerable private collections, very obviously including that of Mapin in Ahmedabad.

S. C. Sekhar, the chartered accountant, put up a very successful show of 64 attractive photographs from his 20 years of clicking. But, to reiterate a point I have made earlier in these columns, making pretty pictures is a non-issue in an age when equipment ensures that what you see is what you get even if you are an idiot. Success is merely a matter of individual visual literacy. If you can recognize a "good picture" in a magazine, exhibition or whatever, you will probably also recognize it with very slight effort in the field, and then, with a Rs. 2,000 auto-everything camera you just point and shoot to seize another successful image for your next exhibition.

To take a classic example, a member of an American photo-workshop I led through Rajasthan last month carried 100 rolls of raw-stock for personal use through the 11-day schedule. Not surprisingly, she was the only professional in the group, for 3,600 photographs taken by almost anybody with modern equipment will readily yield a 64-print exhibition, or a photo-feature, or a coffee-table book, or all three and more, merely by circumspect editing.

This is the basis of the catharsis I speak of. The exalted status photographer in India have held over the years is threatened today. Being able to take a technically correct picture is now far less qualification for anything than being able, for example, to perform the comparatively highly-skilled function of typing. So photographers are repositioning themselves as photo-editors, exhibition commissioners, societies, fora and what-not. Even I gloat that today I am a writer on photography rather than just a photographer, thank god.

The issues are no longer about pictures but rather about what pictures are doing, and what they can do. The visual image has, for example, always created icons ranging from likenesses of gods in temples to that of kings on coinage. Prophet Mohammed probably had an inkling of the problem this can create when he banned representational images in Islam.

Take the destruction of the Babri Masjid in India as opposed to the retaliatory destruction of temples in Pakistan. The one is different from the other only in that media, and the visual image in particular, created an icon from the former. And the basis for this visual icon was substantially rooted in the earlier visual icon that just fleetingly emerged from Doordarshan's Ramayan serial. This example, while pertinent, is perhaps not so perfect as what emerged from the experience of photographers in the Bangladesh liberation struggle. When photographs of public lynchings started piling up a bit much, the photographers began to suspect that the camera itself was a factor. So, they started putting down cameras whenever such ugly scenes arose, and the lynchings stopped.

Deep in our core we all recognize the stakes. Somebody gets photographed burning himself on the Mandal issue, makes cover stories, becomes a celebrity, goes on to become DUSU president! Others, taking a lead from this, burn themselves too, and die worrying about whether their pictures made the morning papers. The motivations are quite the same when a loud-mouth parliamentarian gets peevish about not being included in Doordarshan's coverage. Or when L. K. Advani looks pleased that he is being arrested under the scrutiny of the visual media. In fact, public money is routinely squandered on a huge scale to serve this motivation in politicians. To quote Satish again, "Photography in the 1850s conferred on the common man a right reserved for saints and heroes: the right, and means, to be portrayed."

Photography today should obviously be clubbed with cinema and television. And with the reach of all these coupled to that of print media, what has emerged is an heady ambrosia sought by too many. But then, why did the kar sevaks of Ayodhya assault members of the visual media? Simple: because the visual medium ~in fact any medium of communication~ is welcomed by the subject only when it focuses upon the image that the subject himself/herself wishes to project. The conflict between film stars and the film media earlier this year was essentially the same as what occurred in Ayodhya.

Now, the catharsis seizing Indian Photography has much broader ramifications. What many have begun to realize is that in terms of the visual image, we subscribe to a western image of India. To take the first image first, witness the nature and focus of tourist fascination with this nation, and then notice how exactly Indian photographers aspire to and produce matching images. The abdication of Indian sensibilities is so complete that even pictures of nude and semi-nude women taking religious baths are visual icons of India gracing the pages and covers of prestigious books of Indian photography. Not surprising then, that cameras have become unwelcome in very many of our religious places. More pertinently, Indians today treat Indian photographers the same as those from anywhere else on earth. And the tragedy is entirely of our own making.

There is no secret about the fact that the international visual image of India is not the self-image of the nation. Indian photography has failed us, the Indian print-media has failed us, Indian state-television and institutional activity has failed us, and Indian cinema sums up the caricatures we have therefore made of ourselves. They are all based on pretty pictures, yes, but to reiterate, the issue is about what these images are doing and what they can do.

To drive home the point that we have destroyed the credibility of our visual media without even understanding it, we only need to look at Indian television. The only image it carried on the events of Ayodhya was of the Prime Minister, bent over some scratch-sheet with two microphones clipped prominently to his lapel. Top-light etched the contours of an unfortunate nose and gleamed off a reflective bald pate studiously held in situ while the chief executive of a nation of 900 million people read a statement that was thus rendered completely obscure.

In contrast, BBC showed substantial footage of the actual events. And, having thus established its credibility in the matter, it is in a position to again define the image of India to us and the world, from a very good understanding of a quite different thing. Namely, how visuals work. That is all.

But then, the price of potatoes is no news
(The Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, December 27, 1992)

If we were frank with ourselves we would admit that India, while it contains the genetic signals of an ancient civilization, is a very young nation just emerged from 200 years of colonial rule. We are, as a nation, still in search of an identity where we are not yet agreed upon a link-language, and undecided even upon the size, shape and colour of our coinage and paper money. While doddering old men pontificate upon what an Indian, a Muslim, and a Hindu is, our children turn Springsteen's Born In The USA into a megahit.

In such a situation, the morning newspaper is about the only passive reflective available to an average citizen ­who seldom ventures beyond his little world stretching from his home to his place of work­ of the identity of the nation which extends beyond. The visual frame in the newspaper is something he contends with everyday. Images are retained, ideas accumulated, and the content of this frame keeps getting built up. Eventually, or always, this amounts substantially to the totality of the image of the nation he carries in his mind in terms of what events are happening, and how he responds to them.

The Pioneer has just completed a year of publication in Delhi, and in celebration, put up a show of select pictures from the 365 issues of the period. This offered us an opportunity to see what the visual medium has fed its public, how it was focused. As the paper is a mainstream daily, we could take it as representative of all Delhi papers. Also, let us view the photographers as cogs in the system, purely serving editorial direction, or at least subject to editorial selection. And let us speculate that images from the BJP-VHP-RSS combine and its activities have been completely excluded as a reaction to December 6.

Now, the nature of this photographic phenomenon we are daily bombarded with is obvious in a picture of Radu, the 'kidnapped' Romanian, returning. There are at least a dozen photographers in the picture focusing on the one man, with probably all of the mainstream dailies represented. So okay, that was news. However, it is unsettling that very many of the same photographers, and more, haunt over half the pictures on show, albeit as a ghostly unseen presence. What emerges is that handsome visuals or not, all these are the product of a certain institutional quest for an image. But what is this image, and who is creating it?

Most pertinently, in spite of the obvious exclusions, a large proportion of images from the show focus upon the political arena although the entire period represented is outside any major election. It is apparently just a media habit carried over from times when giants strode upon our political map. In a situation where editorial focus seems to be captive to this habit, a measure of the media is easily taken. Today, political competition is fierce in dictating the subject for the image-of-the-day, and the logical formula one arrives at is to create a 'photo-opportunity'. Receive a VIP, 'grace' an 'occasion', do a 'padayatra'; bus 100,000 vagrants into town and stand on a tall stage before them; ride a painted plywood 'rath-on-a-truck'; create your own issues; be outrageous.

Suddenly we are talking about the few pictures left over in the show, and these alone have been freely seized from everyday reality to place a context on all of the other goings-on. This tiny category is epitomized by the visual of a man carrying his wife home on his shoulders. She wears a cast from hip to toe and clutches her crutches as Maruti cars whiz by. There are human values and concerns addressed by this one visual that contrast sharply with the normal routine of an aberrant media which prefers to exalt the man in the painted plywood 'rath-on-a-truck' as the icon of a Hindu 'resurgence and 'backlash' or project an abandoned old building in Ayodhya as something more meaningful to focus upon for the entire year represented and more.

So we have more than half the visuals focusing upon politics and politicians in particular. We have about one quarter focusing on sports. We have two pictures from examination-result reactions, and a few portraits of people including a blind boy, and a baba sharing chaat with a foreign tourist. We have two images of men bearing burdens on their shoulders: one perforce carries his injured wife, and one ­another politician­ holds just his head above an excess of garlands, like a worm emerging from a cow-patty. With the latter and his ilk being projected daily as the singular central focus of attention of our entire news media, it is no surprise to read the letter from Suresh Kapur of Amritsar (TOI, December 16): " I am one of the thousands of Indians who have lost their identity."

To sum up: the Indian news media which daily poses as objectively reflective of the reality and concerns of India, must at the end of any given year be able to represent the self-image of what India was all about in that year. Unfortunately what we find in this very representative example, inspite of the exclusions, is that such is not the case. I'm afraid 900 million people have to be represented by a multiplicity of visuals addressing a variety of concerns and issues, so that a multiplicity of icons may emerge to allow sensible perspectives on each. What will become apparent is that over the last one year, while the media was unwittingly blowing up the non-issue till tragedy was logically visited upon us, Babri Masjid had nothing to do with even the price of potatoes.

It's a coup
(The Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, January 31, 1993)

The tally for 1992 is in: about 22 photography shows were held in Delhi to present over 100 photographers! The Government of India also entered the scrum, piggy-backing a proposed National Centre of Photography onto the upcoming 'Cultural Policy'. No doubt we can now expect a lavish photography festival where ministers will be photographed holding forth on photography to photographers.

Unfortunately, reports from Palika Bazaar, Karol Bagh and Chandni Chowk place cameras and film high up on the year's best-seller list. Computerised print-shops are spewing out photographs everywhere folks. We're talking about a very public activity.

And now 1993 has taken off with a bang. Max Muller Bhavan has dedicated a gallery to photography for two years. This will inevitably be seized by a German vision. However, a diplomatic coup has been struck with the inaugural show displaying the works of S. Paul, an Indian master-photographer.

Having, got into photography in the early '50s Paul now represents an era, and it is a privilege to have his work on show for such an extended stint (till February 9). His was an era that began to explore the uniqueness of the medium by addressing 'found' objects, events, situations and circumstances. To quote Paul, "I choose ordinary day-to-day events and show them to others who may overlook them. I break their rules of life. I awaken then from their materialistic dream, informing entertaining, even educating them."

It is a kind of photography that along with social landscape, became extremely widespread, to the extent that an institution in France started archiving entire contact sheets from photographers for a clearer notion of what, precisely, was sought to be done or said by each. It is a kind of photography that is still de riguer in the learning process for tomorrow's professionals. Unfortunately however, unlike in the West, such photography never really gained a market in India. Nor were any books ever produced here for this kind of work, although it was very well looked-upon through the '60s and '70s for its "revealing insights, formal beauty and structural balance."

Today, things are very different. Indian photographers are questioning and challenging basic traditional photographic concepts. They are looking for meaningfulness in the medium, having recognized the clear distinction from painting and other more plastic arts. The direction Indian Photography has taken for the last two decades is now transparently frightening. A perfect example was presented in the 'My Land, My People' show last year. The entire Indian section of social landscape photography, represented by a good number of our most eminent practitioners, completely excluded views from the strata of society that the photographers themselves belonged to ~ the strata they are expected to know best!

By always focusing outwards they demonstrated fascination and mystification rather than understanding and comprehension. Suddenly, we began to realize that definitive photography on India was captive to a cardinal crime in documentation: We had either been imposing and institutionalizing our own elitist standards on our subjects, or were victim to the motivations and machinations of many cannier subjects. Politicians, feminists, homosexuals, film stars, environmentalists and others routinely set photo opportunities like rings in our noses to fight their own battles. Photographers searched high and low for images, with purely visual mindsets. Photographs were gravely hung in galleries for no more reason than that they looked good.

The bitter reality now emerging is that photography itself is no art form; it is just a medium. And as with every medium, we shall have to begin telling our own tales with it. Paul's generation explored the unique potentials and malleability of photography but to quote the Buddhists, "Nothing is what is seems to be. Everything is what you make of it."

Tomorrow's photographer will use photography to speak.

Fuji's the star?
(The Sunday Times of India, February 14, 1993)

"Go talk to Ashvin Gatha. He's been flooding us with notes," says the voice on the phone. But, "He's -you know- loud," said Ram Dhamija at the opening, some days ago. And said famous photographer Raghu Rai: "They (the organisers) don't even know what modernism is in photography. So they bring Ashvin Gatha who has not cared to go beyond the same old romantic images for the last 20 years." And then this from Ravi Bab"Just think, Living Colours! If he'd gone to Subzi Mandi, at least he'd be showing subzi."

Non-photographers however coo and ooh and ah, and they should too, for this is a very exclusive 115 photographs selected from hundreds of thousands gathered in travels across the globe, as a lifetime's work. Four square feet of newspaper space has by now featured Gatha and "Agfa's new CRN series of polyethylene-based Agfachrome paper selected for their natural colour and long life."

Again we have an NRI lecturing down to the nation, this time because he has bought non-acidic mounting paper and adhesive tapes from Switzerland, for the "three generation life-time prints" (Agfa's, remember?) that he has brought in acid-free packing along with an honest-to-goodness Swiss designer. Unlike us third world country cousins who, according to Gatha, cannot even process film as well as 'tis done in Lausanne, this apparently archival material will be handled with gloves, or not at all.

Behold, three finger-impressions on item 99, titled Desert Ride, instantly become the funniest fingerprints we've ever seen.

The gloves came off Indian photography long ago. We didn't have the photography books or magazines, or live in Switzerland, but we know photography, and we know dead stock, no matter how beautiful. No, I do not want to talk to Ashvin Gatha, I want to talk to Fuji, and Kodak, and Konica.

Talking about Fuji, 15 rolls of film each for 6th to 12th prizes in Alliance Francaise' photo-contest is a joke in India, where we gobble up their material on a huge scale.

Talking about photo-contests, the Rs. 1 Lakh National Award for Excellence in Photography is probably less than what it will cost the citizens of India for publicity, or the selection process.

These contests are asking for 5 to 10 large photographic prints each (easily Rs. 1,000 including wastage) as entry pre-qualification, while MTV offers a ski-trip for two to Korea as first prize against postcard entries.

Talking of MTV, computer graphics is going great guns: nine great Indian painters spent 30 months with a computer to do pretty much what they've always done ~ to sell a laser-jet printer. Well, talking of laser-jet printers, placing one in the NGMA fetches better press coverage than a stall in the trade fair down the road. Why then, did the director thank the marketing wizards rather than vice versa?

We're probing the visual media that have been thrust upon us by a global materials and equipment hold in which we've been the losers for too long. Let us not forget that a private TV station in Hong Kong is the most powerful cultural catalyst in India today. We are trying to bend these media to our purpose, against idiotic odds like Doordarshan's monopoly, which leave just photography as our only truly autonomous visual medium.

A microscopic but vital first step was the incredible goodwill that N. K. Dixit had managed to create for Lalit Kala's upcoming National Biennale of Photography, as its convener. Invited photographers had negotiated considerable creative autonomy, and we were expecting explorations into basic illusions, myths, powers and potentials of the medium. But Dixit is now down with a stroke, and the show seems uncertain. The system Dixit sought to rejuvenate defeated him with piffle like procurement procedure for one copy of the Mytec directory of Indian photographers, inadequate staff, bus-travel. Panicky pashas of photography also did no good with an attempted boycott seeking to institutionalize the eminence of their intellectual stasis.

It is all a peculiar tragedy that may cost the growth of Indian photography very dearly ­ and the issues go way beyond photography. To take one simple example of how out of our control the entire technological phenomenon of today's visual media is, witness BBC's performance in recent weeks. It alone showed us the Babri Masjid demolition, and then put us in touch with our own Prime Minister fielding their choice of 'your' questions. Now, recall that they never showed us Fergie's fling.

It is just not funny.

Of technique and vision
(Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, March 28,1993)

The new photo gallery at Max Mueller Bhavan has at last come into its own with the first show (since the gallery's dedication) by a German photographer, Werner Pawlok. In the title, 'Transfers', Pawlok points to the Polaroid process he uses with the gigantic 50x60 cms. 1976 Land System. The photochemical process of all Polaroid films is itself a dye-transfer photographic process that is financially unfeasible as a creative medium in India, as things stand today.

Pawlok's work is fascinating mainly because the territory he explores is so unfamiliar to us. Aside from the fact that Indian photographers cannot afford the luxury of a simple SX-70 Polaroid format, the particular materials and camera Pawlok uses are available at apparently just three designated Polaroid Corporation studios (they are very rarely lent out).

Nevertheless the point to note in his work is the unabashed artistic urge to take up a medium by its ears and force it towards a preconceived creative intent.

As photographers in Delhi have for a while been vociferously shouting down manipulations of technique as the bane of Indian photography, caused by not keeping abreast of what's happening in photography around the world, Pawlok's show is a delight! Not, unfortunately, so much for his talent as for what he represents. After all, Marty Fumo and John Reuter, amongst others, were cutting Polaroid photographs open from behind many years ago to manipulate emulsions in a bid to dissolve the original claim to reality.

And even the simple expedient of manipulating images by applying pressure during developing has been common for a long time. Polaroid materials are perfect artistic tools as even Pawlok's 50x60 cms prints are ready-to-view just 75 seconds after shooting. Then his final images are somehow transferred onto exotic fabrics or paper with tears in the emulsions, the processor-pod smudge above, and the residual chemical sludge below all incorporated into the image with occasional over-painting.

As a foreign photographer showing in India, his work has to be compared with others who have gone before, and it has to be said that in comparison he falls a bit short to the contributors of the 'Modernist Still Life' show we saw last year. With nothing so brazen as Pawlok's manipulations, Robert Mapplethorpe for example showed photogravure ink (not silver) prints; Sheila Metzner's prints were composed of seven to eight rather than the normal four colours; Olivia Parker used selenium toning, and so on, without any among them seeking to destroy the basic nature, the 'terrible preciseness', of the medium. Now, Betty Hahn, who was among the first group of photographers invited to use the huge Polaroid camera in fact showed terribly precise 'Botanical Plates'. And this was done much after she had experimented with all manner of manipulation right up to creating pseudo-daguerrotypes by photocopying prints onto silvered fabric, etc., while very many other photographers were directly printing onto photo-sensitized fabric. Irving Penn meanwhile printed on platinum and palladium hand-coated papers using up to four duplicate negatives of varied exposures printed in perfect register to achieve a " Perplexing depth and beauty." Penn also gained a long and sustained applause foe using a collapsible studio and background to shoot various tribal peoples, on assignment. His obvious statement was that while he knew a great deal about photography, he knew nothing of those peoples.

All this can be seen as a reaction to movements like that launched by Lief Friedlander and others who claimed in the 1960's that photography had the role of yielding a representative visual-document of our life and times by focusing upon the candid "ordinaries" of our existence and environment. That this was impossible was immediately clear in their always and inescapably choosing to shoot particular people, moments and situations, over others. There can obviously, for example, be no 'photo-document' or photography book on India that will represent the life and times of the readers of this column. Rather than representing any reality, the medium is merely predatory upon reality, and when entering the domain of Art, what is seen through the lens is less important than the imagination behind it. Of the latter, to be fair, Pawlok has his share.

Captions tell the story
(The Sunday Times of India, April 25, 1993)

Another flurry of photo shows, and a most peculiar business too. The medium seems to be going through mysterious movements in India, and it's obvious that there have been too few efforts at answering the basic question of: what the heck is going on?

Rajan Kapoor had a show of pictures from the Pushkar Mela, at Triveni Kala Sangam. The brochure says he established himself in the field of creative photography with such material. It also mentions that this work is the result of days spent in the thick of the fair for two consecutive years. Thousands of other photographers from around the world also visit the fair, we are informed. So, what is this material? It seems to be good travel magazine work, but what is it doing in a gallery?

Another fascinating show was the world news photographs at the AIFACS. This was a sort of box office hit, with people having to look around, over, and under each other at the exhibits. News photographs apparently hold a very great fascination for people, and so we are showered continuously by the media, and now by galleries too. Time was when the gallery for news and photography was newspapers and magazines, but it's a small point. What should actually be noted is the news pictures' dependance on captions. In fact, a case can be made that, by themselves, they are not objective historical documents, or visual history.

To cite an example, two news pictures ­from Bangladesh and Afghanistan, if I recall right­ were entitled as images of executions. However, the first showed a uniformed soldier raising his hand to deliver an undoubtedly nasty blow to a man held down with the other hand. The other image was of a bearded elderly gentleman being escorted somewhere by some guerrillas. Something peculiar to photography has attuned us to suspending disbelief, which shouldn't matter too much till we probe a little further into the phenomenon of modern news coverage.

Review in your mind, two kinds of news photographs: the first, and most common, focuses on an event, person or whatever is deemed newsworthy. The other, much rarer, news photograph focuses upon the ridiculous number of photographers who collaborate to stay out of each other's frames while capturing the former image. The act of gathering news photographs is obviously a phenomenon that needs to be understood. Today, no modern military or political exercise is complete without the visual media. The media component is obviously involved. But who does the media belong to? Most frighteningly, it is always the so-called "Big Powers"! For example, there have been no Iraqi or Kuwaiti pictures from the Gulf War, no Bosnian pictures from the Bosnian tragedy, no Vietnamese pictures from the Vietnam War, etc. There's something to think about in that.

Another point is this whole business of creative photography. It would seem a small thing to expect that creativity emanates from the imagination. However, we seem generally to be content to accept a 'search' for images as Art. The industrial / commercial / advertising photographer in India, for example, is almost never numbered among our creative photographers, although his field of work is the most demanding, in purely photographic terms.

To stress the point, let us inspect the case of the much-acclaimed photograph of an incinerated Iraqi soldier, at the AIFACS show. The first question that arises, before celebrating this 'masterpiece' is: Could the 'mastery' of the photographer have managed without the incinerated soldier, or did the photographer just get lucky? Many photographers, including Rajan Kapoor, admit to the latter about themselves. Are all these shows, then, displays of luck? Perhaps not, but let's investigate further.

The American Centre had a very professional show of portraits of black American women of importance. Straightforward portraits of good quality, formatted to create an icon from the concept. The only catch is that in our country, a parallel would constitute something as absurd as exclusively focusing upon women of some exotic 'sub-caste' who have contributed to the social progress of this nation of so many women and so many 'castes'.

On the other hand there is this strange show from Switzerland, Trace of Form, at Rabindra Bhavan. Here, photography was used pretty extensively in a novel, non-judgmental, non-subjective, non-exploitative way. One block in the show, for example, has 24 images of 24 different roads shot with exactly the same composition, lens and perspective. Photography, good, bad, or ugly, is not the issue. It is just the tool, the medium. What matters is the idea, the imagination, the use of the medium. There are no riddles about why these pictures should hang in a gallery. They are not news photographs and they are not travel photographs. They are one work. They aspire. They have no place else to be.

Formal celebration of feudalism
[this title and the gaffe below (*) always reminds me that not one of the titles was by me]
(The Times of India, 11 October 1993)

Raja Deen Dayal: IGNCA
Homi Vyarawala:MMB
All India Photographers Association:AIFACS (*actually the 'Advertising and Industrial Photographers Association' at Taj Palace Hotel)

It gladdens one that the idea of looking at photography as an independent medium has caught on in this city. We've had a string of top-of-the-line shows in the last couple of weeks.

The Raja Deen Dayal exhibition is, as expected, a show of formalism (especially portraiture) in the finest sense of the term. A mustsee, with posh regal stuff to boot.

Deen Dayal's work is obviously a national treasure, but an interesting thought is being bandied about these days, that there must surely be other, equally significant bodies of work in the history of Indian photography, all still waiting to be discovered. Besides, formalism evolved and stayed with us through the years, finding contemporary expression in fashion portraiture, pictorial glamour and advertising work. As such, it is many things to many people, but in essence, it remains a civilized transaction between photographer and subject, where each honours and complements the other.

Whereas the decisive moment served the Raja well with horses and tent-pegging, photographing people was an exercise in exalting them ~ right across the social spectrum from princelings and colonial officers to the chillum-smoking Bairagi. It now emerges as the celebration of a culture, the most basic expectation from all art. It may be that, in this case, the culture celebrated was feudal and colonial, but sadly, there has been almost no comparable documentation by contemporary practitioners of the visual media in India.

In the last few years, many have championed the view that formalism is a destructive factor for Indian photography today. Because, the argument goes, the medium is unique in its closeness to reality, and therefore commands a certain authority, surely it must possess an individual aesthetic. The corollary claim is that, since they directly address reality with proximity as a prerequisite, the photographic, cinematic, and electronic media are obliged to yield a candid visual record of our times, warts and all, sans exaltation. This may explain why we are currently flooded with images painting contemporary India as peculiar or pathetic. Even if this is damaging to our collective self-image.

The debate raged verbally for a while, but now Homai Vyarawala's show has been curated by Satish Sharma, partially to advance this ephemeral aesthetic. Unfortunately however, when candid pictures of the heroes of modern India are interspersed with pictures from a child Sanjay Ghandhi's birthday parties, then, with all respects to Ms. Vyarawala, it had less to do with the aesthetics of photography than with nostalgic minutae from the early days of independent India. Nostalgia, however, has been specifically denied as a factor in the basic intent of the show, and we are asked to instead draw lessons on photography itself.

While each viewer knows what is best for him, what delighted me was Ms. Vyarawala's attitude to the frame. She unhesitatingly cropped images in a reiteration of freedom, unlike those who argue that, as a measure of honesty in documentation, photographers should show all, including the frame edge. It also flew in the face of the mean traditionalist view that photography should be bound by rules, "like boxing"! In an age when photographs can be scanned into home computers, fiddled with, and outputted as negatives, transparencies or video, we need open, creative attitudes and minds. This show when added to the SAARC photography show last year and the AIPA show last week, offers a rare perspective on the state of Indian photography. There are a few breakthroughs in technique, a couple of new names to contend with. But there is little clue to any meaningful process of creative evolution.

Unfortunately the AIPA show wasn't much better, although superior technological bases were evident. It was also sad to see photographs hung without frames in a show by a professional body. The saddest of all, however, is that not one photograph among the hundreds seen in shows over last three years, has seized one with wonder.

This, when the rest of the world is celebrating itself in our houses through satellite TV. When the rebels of Moscow's white House desperately gambled for the control of a TV station, prompting Yeltsin to pull out the big guns. When horror runs through the United States by just one image of the half naked body of a downed US helicopter pilot being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.

Would we have reacted in the same manner if the mere image had been that of an Indian? The answer hurts us.

Shankar Barua