Rahab Allana, The Hindu Magazine, April 12, 2009
How is reality and representation related to photography, especially those of colonial encounters from the 19th century in the archives? What role does the archivist play? These were some of the questions raised at a seminar organised in Delhi recently.
The medium of the camera contains a dual line of vision, the ability to look forward (at a subject or specimen) and backwards (at the photographer, at his context) at the same time.
Early photography in India raises innumerable concerns about the representation of Indians predating the nationalist movement. The talks held at the IIC, Delhi, recently, organised by the Alkazi Foundation, sought to highlight apparent fissures in the historiography of the early era of photography, and the perception of “reality” in visual practice. With an emphasis on archival research conducted in some of the most important photographic collections in India, namely, the Alkazi Collection of Photography, Delhi, the Chowmahalla Palace archive, Hyderabad, and Udaipur Palace Museum Collection, Udaipur, the talks aimed to articulate facets that ground the study of early photography in terms that are contemporaneous, that evidently link past with present.
The incessant engagement with visuals from the last century highlight a growing paradigm of “salvaging” the past, an inherent part in the fields of disciplinary practice, as well as the work conducted on the ground. Rather than to visually regurgitate the past as mere “document”, the talks made an effort to deflect from a direct reference to an instinct for preservation. Rather an alternative disciplinary approach was engaged, a scenario where the work of researching early photographs, indeed the swarm of contradictions, ambiguities and provocations withheld in their histories, was addressed as a domain of investigation that should be imaginably perceived, forged and developed.
Reinforcing old positions
Ever since it was invented, the camera’s faithfulness to “truth” assisted in the validation of identity, and the seamless construction (and erosion) of categories. The photograph moved upward in the market as a popular medium in the early 20th century, as much as it stirred across cultural frontiers. Therefore, the cult of looking at an image led invariably to the shifting role of expectation, visual representation as a mode of fantasy, and equally, a re-enforcement of position, class, and survey. While much of the work of the early expeditionary photographers, such as Samuel Bourne (1834-1912) and Felice Beato (c.1825-1910) among others, was about revealing the exciting pace of the journeying eye, the work of Lala Deen Dayal and his interactions with army officer Lepel Griffin (Agent for Central India) were about an exchange of ideas on Indian architecture; the timeless frames of Darigha Abbas Ali in Lucknow, recreated the courtly traditions of Avadh. Professionals constantly enabled photography as a social statement, representing that median position between actuality and art, reality and perception. That is to say, where the image is a fixed or static entity, its meaning is not.
A photographic archive of colonial encounters, wherever prevalent, invariably yields a complex notion of art associated with historiography. Therefore, researching early visual records of life on the outposts of South Asian studies is increasingly about the role of the individual archivist, and the manner in which he/she unwittingly, yet self-consciously, enters their histories by opening out what lies behind the image. Only then does history become evidence, a visible part of our personal worlds, engaging areas that traverse the spaces between antiquity, modernism and contemporary visual cultures. It is with this broad and expansive perspective that the talks were conceived, a platform for articulating the innumerable possibilities of ideas developed by archivists and researchers, and their trajectories on early photography.
Link with modernism
The emphasis on early photography is made here to seek out the links it sustains with the birth of modernism. If the latter is conceived as a dynamic break with tradition, how does the phenomenon of picture-making affect the identities of its subjects through the relay of visual messages? Early photography on the whole was still far from being a totally democratic picture-making activity that had wide-ranging circulation in the 19th century. Such dissemination had to wait until further developments in negative types, different forms of factory printing, and the invention of Kodak cameras in the early 20th century. The existence of many extant personal albums in varied collections, in the form of scrapbooks and loose images, belonging to a widespread group of societies, demonstrates its growing popular mass appeal.
Accordingly, the range of talks manoeuvred the essential categories of patronage, circulation, adaptability, access and transformations witnessed by some of India’s earliest photographs. The first was a study of the vast collection from the Chowmahalla Palace, amassed by one of the most renowned “native” Indian facilitators of photography in the 19th century, Nizam Mahboob Ali Khan. His formal benefaction of studios, together with important court photographers such as Lala Deen Dayal, enables a dual approach to the lexicon of visualisation, a space where formal and informal images exist in the same universe, albeit with different viewerships. (Speaker: Anita Jacob.)
A similar excitement with the medium was expressed by the key European patrons of photography in the 19th century in India, Lord and Lady Canning, and was teased out through a private album (currently in the Metropolitan Museum in New York) which yields significant notions about the birth of a “modern” approach where photographs are representations of a private life, rather than conforming to heavily staged and composed photographs for commercial, political or administrative reasons alone. (Speaker: Deepthi Sasidharan.) A revealing new archive was also brought to light, with the recent documentation of the Udaipur City Palace archive and the royal gems stored within. Its reserves yield a vibrant local culture of portraiture and ceremonial occasions in the 19th century. These inherently relate with a trans-national and multi-dimensional view on our recent past. (Speaker: Pramod Kumar.)
These encounters with the medium eventually led us to question the notion of “interpretation” through images. As a result, the latter section of the talks altered the trajectory from “patronage” to “approach”. The characterisation of peoples in the 19th century, with a broader selection of “native castes and tribes” rather than the “elite” alone, was gradually uncovered in order to ascertain how anthropology had been central to the investigation of civilisation, analysed even through a variety of photographic formats (portraits, groups etc). (Speaker: Akshaya Tankha.) This was also elucidated, through the medium’s transformation from the “canvas to the camera”. (Speaker: Meha Desai.)
Questions of authorship
The new medium inherently allowed for refreshment in the ideas of how and where it could be applied, and occasioned a series of practitioners to often work jointly, or independently. Therefore, in the entirety of the talks, the speakers sought to suggest the complexities of “authorship”, of who is producing for whom. A talk by Suryanandini Sinha examined the frames occupied by women as subjects of photography in colonial India with specific reference to Studios in the cities of Mumbai and Delhi. With keen observations highlighting possible hierarchies, status and gender issues the talks also dwelled on imagined selves in photographic articulations. This was followed by the final talk on photography’s connection to “realism” seen through a fusion of imaging styles: the painted photograph. (Speaker: Rahaab Allana.)
Dual direction
The medium of the camera contains a dual line of vision, the ability to look forward (at a subject or specimen) and backwards (at the photographer, at his context) at the same time. We have, through this trajectory, understood that photography is not content at being merely a handmaiden to industry, to the sheer number of images being created. At a very basic level, it is in fact, a tool that negotiates what was seen, what is captured, and that which actually occurred. And so through the archive of early photographs, we find that not only did photography modify the visual representation of India, but its objective in India was also modified, its history was gradually being recast into official structures (The People of India series), wherein individuals became virtual repositories of the past, sites somehow contained and emanated with the lives that had perished in defending a way of life (The images of the aftermath of 1857).
Extendedly, the archive is a legacy, an intuitive circuit of our lives and therefore, the culture of people who managed to reach beyond the frames of their own world and provide a moment, a moment perhaps of respite for us to absorb their hopes, to cultivate, at times, their intellectual resources. It is with homage to them that an archive grows and becomes part of our personal worlds, enabling the possibility for delving into culture, and cross referencing areas that lie between and within the various registers of antiquity and modernity. But apart from being merely an intellectual arena, it allows us to take our bearings from what we can see: a world that is three dimensional, perceived through two eyes, and not only the one of the lens. A majority of the talks will be published by Marg Publishers in the final quarter of 2009.