Photography

The need to define a unique cultural identity has plagued accounts of photography in the region. I will suggest the need to focus on a more complex experience, tracking how photography developed through the circulation of photographs and photographers, as part of complicated global flows, alliances and collaborations, regional networks and exchanges, and the ‘make-do’ culture of technical innovation, repair and recycling. I also place emphasis on how photographic practice works in connection with other media, be it in photographic production, circulation, or display. In the process, I hope these stories located in South Asia will reframe thinking about photography as it has been recounted in European and North American histories.

Today, the smartphone revolution of the 21st century has created an entirely new constituency of camera-proficient users without the pre-requisites of computer literacy. As we witness people across class, caste and gender taking ‘selfies’ or making pictures using Apps and posting them on social media, it is hard to imagine that photography once had a more exclusive history in the region. Lens-based practices arrived in South Asia almost simultaneously with North America and Europe, but there was never a ‘Kodak moment’ as self-owned cameras were limited to the elite. In contrast, proprietor-owned studios became aspirational and phantasmatic spaces to be photographed in. Early scholarship on popular vernacular practices emphasised a corporeal and affective engagement with hybrid images as opposed to a more distanced modernist imagination in the ‘West’ (Pinney, 1997, 2004). But professional photography grew in diverse directions in the subcontinent that included multiple practices and genres such as photo-journalism, documentary, industrial and commercial work as well as intermedial art works.

Photography as a global form participated in the making, remaking and unmaking of identities, often through coordinates that extended beyond the borders of the ‘nation state’. Thus Sunil Janah who began his career as a photographer for publications of the Communist Party of India such as People’s War entered into a collaboration with Life photographer Margaret Bourke White (Rahman, 2010). Other visitors such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Gedney or Werner Bischof also made iconic images in and of India (Gaskell & Gujral, 2018). A fascinating archive of publicity photographs and production stills discovered recently is that of the German cinematographer Josef Wirsching, who was involved from 1934 in setting up the major film studio, Bombay Talkies. His presence in the industry for over three decades speaks of transnational connections between Germany and India (Mukherjee, 2018). Where do we locate the work of all these ‘outsiders’ and, conversely, should the minimalist impulse of Nasreen Mohamedi, the industrial work of Mitter Bedi and Ahmad Ali or the documentary pictures of Dayanita Singh be seen as uniquely ‘Indian’? Photographic documentation of indentured labour from North India to Mauritius in the late 19th century, ¹ the online site Indian Memory Project that traces histories of the subcontinent through annotated analogue photographs, ² or the personal photographs of Asian immigrants to Canada from the Family Camera Network project ³ are other examples of photographic initiatives that capture alternate geographies of migration among subaltern and middle class populations.

Photographs and photographers, networked through global and regional flows, can also be tracked through indices of display, exhibition and circulation. European expositions had always displayed photographs from the colonies. Postcards with photographic vistas printed in foreign presses circulated all over the world as souvenirs of a South Asian colonial experience (Khan, 2018). In the mid-20th century Edward Steichen’s well known exhibition Family of Man toured several Indian cities. The show was widely criticised as Cold War propaganda indifferent to the specificities of the South. But it put international works on display and inspired an ‘Images of India’ exhibition in Bombay which attracted almost 100,000 entries from across the country (Gupta, 2015, p. 33). International travel by photographers, artists and film-makers was also much more prolific from the 20th century. Devender Nath Handa, from the Photo Division of the Indian government, studied commercial, portrait and motion picture photography at the New York Institute of Photography in 1933 (personal papers from the family), while Madan Mehta learnt studio techniques at the Guildford School of Arts and Crafts, Surrey in the early 1950s (Mehta, 2015). Based in Nairobi, Jitendra Arya relocated to London to apprentice under Hungarian-British photojournalist Michael Peto. He set up a successful studio practice in Chiswick before settling in Bombay (Gadihoke, 2017). Gujarat-born Kishore Parekh studied film-making and photography during the late 1950s at the University of Southern California before his career as a press photographer in India (‘Divali in America’, Illustrated Weekly of India, 1959, pp 66–67). Nasreen Mohamedi moved between Bahrain, where her family owned a camera shop, and Paris, finally coming to teach art in Baroda (Gaskell & Gujral, 2018). Influenced by Rajasthani miniature painting, Raghubir Singh who lived between Europe and America created a hybridised ‘creole’ form of modernist work in vibrant colour quite distinct from western modernism (Gaskell & Gujral, 2018). Many photographers crossed genres and media easily. Mohamedi was also a painter and printmaker, Parekh moved from press photography to commercial work for an illustrated Hong Kong magazine, returning to India to take pictures of the Liberation War in Bangladesh. Mitter Bedi, known for commercial and industrial photography, began his career in a printing press and film production house. Madan Mehta straddled architectural photography as well as a flourishing studio practice. By the late 1980s Raghu Rai, Sheba Chhachhi and those who had studied abroad such as Dayanita Singh, Ram Rahman, Sooni Taraporevala and Ketaki Sheth, emerged as significant photographers or multimedia artists (Rahman, 2007).

Intermediality was always a feature of photographic practice in the region. Photographs were key to cinema exhibition as information slides and lobby cards. Vernacular traditions of embellishing photographs with paint and other materials extended across the subcontinent (Pinney, 1997). Significant modernist artists especially from the Baroda school created experimental photographs using techniques like collage (Rahman, 2007). Cut-paste techniques were also a hallmark of sensational tabloids like Blitz, creating hybrid images by adding etchings, cartoons, colour and text to monochrome photographs (Gadihoke, 2010). While archives for the 1950s and 1960s are limited, the story of photography can be pursued through its dispersal in newspapers and glossy magazines. Most significant were the high quality reproductions of the Illustrated Weekly of India, distributed in India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon till the 1960s, making it a truly South Asian publication.

Another narrative distinct from the western trajectory lies in the material cultures of photography marked by piracy, recycling and the idea of jugaad (the makeshift or adapted form). This story is channelled through second-hand local markets, recycled stock, used or junked equipment and self-taught photography through discarded international magazines (Mahadevan, 2015). The difficulties of reproduction on grainy paper also created hybrid forms where photographs, especially advertisements, were worked upon by scraper board artists who added texture with line and colour (Pereira, 1999). These histories still need to be explored as we move away from image-centred discussions of the photograph. Sudhir Mahadevan (2015, pp. 25) has referred to such a focus on the photographic apparatus and its implication in cultures of work and practice as ‘sensory economies’.

There is a need for more research on networks and infrastructures of circulation and exhibition. Till the 1970s, the prints of amateur photographers travelled to photographic clubs and salons in cities across South Asia. In India they were uniquely transported through the postal services. Started by Syed Haider Husaain Razavi in 1940, this was known as the ‘Postal Portfolio’. A few years later this facilitated the ‘Exchange of Exhibits’ which stretched from Afghanistan in the west to Burma in the east (G. Thomas, 1981). A closer look at these accounts of photographic circulation and local journals such as Shochitro Bharat from Bengal reveals the presence of women practitioners outside professional life, such as the twin sisters Manobina Roy and Debalina Mazumdar (Ghosh, 1988, 2014). Mazumdar served as Secretary of the United Provinces Amateur Photographic Association in the late 1930s and as Honorary President of the Photographic Association of Bengal in the early 1980s. In the absence of other records Homai Vyarawalla was the solitary known woman photojournalist till the 1980s. Elided histories of other women photographers as well as amateur and domestic practices may also have to be tracked through personal collections and family holdings. The digitisation of the photographs of Haleema Hashim, Nony Singh and Manobina Roy has made it possible for their work to circulate through books and exhibitions (Gadihoke, 2003, 2013, 2020; Leuzinger, 2019). This also draws attention to how a digital age has facilitated the ‘rediscovery’ and new lives of these analogue collections as they move, from their original location in the humble newspaper or family album into the rarefied space of the museum, gallery or archive.

The past two decades mark a shift from the ‘straight’ photography of press, commercial and industrial photographers, and independent auteurs of the 1960s and the 1970s to intertextual practices as lens-based artists increasingly use photographs along with other (often moving) media to create affective and immersive experiences. As moving images swirl around us with bewildering frequency, will the photograph be subsumed by kinesis? While our current moment is defined by a close conversation between the still and the moving, this convergence is not new. In fact, it echoes an older assemblage tracked by media archaeology in forms like the Bioscope that could project both (Mahadevan, 2015). Photographs have also had a close but subservient relationship to cinema. In the past, ‘mute’ forms such as production stills, lobby cards, printed material in postcards, fan diaries and magazines were key supplements to the cinema. The unique quality of the photograph, its pensiveness, was of great value to film publicity. The frozen tableau allowed fans to gaze with contemplation at scenes shot on the cine camera (Campany, 2008). In recent times, theorists have noted how technologies of playback with the facility of pause or slow motion available in the VCR, the DVD player or computer software offers the moving image the studied reflection associated with the photograph (Mulvey, 2006). Animating stills very gradually through effects like the Ken Burns application is popular today. In 2008, Nikon became the first digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera to record video, marking a revolution as practitioners now freely move between making still and moving images. This versatile quality makes such cameras extremely popular in one of the largest commercially viable genres today – wedding photography. Originally created as a camera for still photography, it is interesting that the DSLR is better equipped to handle a fixed frame as it cannot easily perform functions taken for granted with older video cameras such as zooming or focussing while in movement. In this sense the DSLR seems to revisit and revive an aesthetic of ‘stillness’ even while it takes moving images. In an age of constantly moving screens where it is difficult to rest the eye, perhaps it will be this very reflective quality of the photograph that we will most return to in the future.