Plot before you click!

My piece about a special exhibit -- on photography and cinema -- at the Delhi Photo Festival:

Some people are just prescient. In a brilliant little story he wrote way back in 1958, when the world was young and photography even more so, the great writer Italo Calvino somehow arrived at the truth about photography in the 21^st century. Through Antonino, the photo-sceptic who turns obsessive photographer, Calvino captured the simultaneous attraction and frustration of taking pictures. “The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful, we must photograph it!', you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it had never existed, and that therefore, in order really to live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can, you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity, the second to madness.”

Now, in a world of mobile phone cameras, Facebook and Instagram, Calvino's words seem even more uncannily true. Given the ceaseless deluge of images in which we live, the big question is: can photography still arrest us? Can it still reveal the world anew? The organisers of the Delhi Photo Festival believe it can. And more than that, they believe they can make us think about the power that the photograph still exerts on our lives.

Organised by the Delhi-based non-profit Nazar Foundation, the Delhi Photo Festival is a biennial event that first took place in 2011. The second instalment is scheduled to run from September 27 to October 11, 2013. Prashant Panjiar, Dinesh Khanna and a Festival Secretariat of younger photographers have made their final selections from an impressive 2349 bodies of work submitted from 90 countries. There's a broad theme, 'grace', drawn from something the late Prabuddha Dasgupta said at DPF 2011. Panjiar says they deliberately kept the theme broad enough that it would encompass a wide variety of styles and subjects, yet also push people to interpret the work they submitted. “We consciously took a decision not to showcase genre photography. Work from all genres is welcome – photojournalism, fashion, wildlife, studio photography, documentary photography, intensely personal projects – but we think a great, or good photographer is one who transcends genre,” says Panjiar. DPF 2013 will have three kinds of exhibitions: works in print that will be mounted in the open areas, walkways and galleries of the India Habitat Centre, digital exhibitions that will run online, as well as – for the first time – partner exhibitions in many of Delhi's major art galleries. The scale is massive: just at the Habitat Centre, bodies of work by 41 individual photographers will be on display.

One highlight is a special exhibition called The Plot, which brings together five photographers inspired by Indian cinema. It is, in some ways, an obvious choice: the cinematic image is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of the photograph in India. Film posters and hoardings overpower so much of our public space, and are the defining feature of so many private ones. From auto-rickshaw interior to a middle class teenager's wall, our choice of filmstars is the fierce display of a private self. Nathan G, a photographer from Chennai, opens up that weird space between public and private which the star image occupies. 'Mad on Stars' is a series of pictures taken on Marina Beach, where outdoor photo studios provide life-sized cutouts of stars for people to pose with. In one image, a young man walks by with a cutout of Kareena Kapoor in white pants, holding it horizontally. The nonchalance with which he grips the smiling Kareena at the hip is wonderful, somehow familiar without being sexual. In another image, a young man pats his hair down in front of a red plastic-framed mirror, while Aishwarya Rai and Aamir Khan seem to look on in consternation. For that one ephemeral instant, the stars have come down to earth, and you can carry home the evidence in the permanently tangible form of a photograph. And yet the two-dimensionality of the photographic cutouts is almost Brechtian, drawing attention to the fakeness of the images.

Several of Jonathan Torgovnik's 'Bollywood Dreams' images are concerned with unmasking – our cinema's mild pretence of reality, even its attempts at glamour, heroism, villainy are revealed in these pictures as bits of tinsel. An intertwined Karishma Kapoor and Bobby Deol strike a pose in tight black clothes, but instead of just their flawless bodies in close-up, we see the wires, the grimy floor – the shoddy backdrop to glamour. A pair of tubby guards in ancient Indian costumes swig tea from cheap chai-shop tumblers. Prem Chopra looks more vulnerable than we have ever seen him: a hapless old man in suspenders trying to look masculine.

Some of Max Pincker's images seem to have a similar unmasking effect – like the picturesque waterfall backdrop that reveals itself as mere wallpaper. 'The Fourth Wall', as Pincker's body of work is titled, explores the imaginary line that separates the audience from the fictional world they are viewing, in this case the world of cinema. But often Pincker's work doesn't so much expose reality as hover in the terrain of surreality: a doorman seems to smile at a cloud of bright yellow smoke in a marbled building lobby; a Salman Khan lookalike stands atop a building terrace, looking for all the world like ready to take off like Superman. There are juxtapositions of gesture that unnerve and amuse: a photograph of one man holding another in his arms is followed by a shot from some 90s Hindi film song where Shahrukh Khan holds his heroine in almost exactly that pose.

The degree to which we live within the cinematic image – or the cinematic image lives inside us – is at the core of Kannagi Khanna's 'Ram aur Shyam'. Khanna's models, her grandfather and his younger brother, wanted to go to Bombay in their youth to try their luck as actors, but their family forbade it, and they spent lives running a printing press. A highlight of Khanna's childhood memories is of watching her Nana “break into popular Dev Anand songs and shake a leg with Nani, for whom this had become routine”, while she remembers her Nana's brother as a man who enjoyed being the “most glamorous member of the family”, who spends two hours daily even today on “self-grooming”. Khanna casts both men, now old, in classic poses associated with the iconic heroes of their times: doffing a hat cheerily as Raj Kapoor's tramp, or striking a threatening pose with a rifle perched on a shoulder as Sunil Dutt's daku.

The most well-known images here – and perhaps the oldest -- are also deliberate in their stageyness: Pushpamala N.'s 'Phantom Lady, or Kismet: a photoromance' (1996-98), where the photographer famously cast and shot herself as a Fearless Nadia figure in Zorro-style costume. Wearing a masquerade-style mask, a feathered hat, black shorts and a long black cape, Phantom Lady appears, in all sorts of classic noirish spaces in a nightime Bombay -- in an empty train station at night, sitting glumly opposite a moustachioed man in a cheap bar, or heroically suspended at the top of a staircase – creating a thriller of sorts.

Photography's originary claim was that of replicating the truth, and photography especially in India has traditionally seen itself as a documenter of fact. But as Calvino long ago understood, that claim can never be sustained entirely: partly because we cannot document everything, and partly because everything documented is not the truth. One of the ways in which photographers in recent years have responded to that impasse is by turning deliberately to the performative. And the world of the cinema, where the real is by definition performed, is in many ways an obvious choice of locale for such a pursuit.

What makes The Plot interesting to me is that it reveals two different directions in which this pursuit can lead. One is what I am calling unmasking. So rather than letting ourselves be lulled into the fake reality of the glamorous magazine cover, we see how hard Kareena and Bobby have to work to create that effect of luxurious oomph in that bare, tubelit studio -- and a different layer of reality is revealed.

The other direction is the opposite: it is to approach the world through staging it. “Staging is one of photography's main characteristics, theatricality, creating a clarified scene out of a chaotic situation,” Max Pinckers said in an email interview. “Every photograph is in essence staged to a certain extent, what I try to do is make that evident by letting the viewer doubt about what he or she sees.” Pushpamala, whose 'Phantom Lady or Kismet' is perhaps one of the earliest instances of photo-performance work in India, has also spoken in an earlier interview of belonging to the other photographic tradition, in which the thing that photography chooses to document is fiction. The person deliberately pretending to be someone else, whether it is Pushpamala's female avenger or Kannagi Khanna's grandfather, or Pincker's men embracing like Shah Rukh and Juhi, drawing on all the resources of cinematic melodrama, produces a powerful effect. “The mask, being first of all a social, historical product,” Calvino managed to say in the same short story, “can contain more truth than any image claiming to be “true”.

First published as part of Yahoo! Originals

Post Facto - Life in pictures: Tales from photo albums old and new

My Sunday Guardian column for this fortnight:

Lately I've been looking at photographs a lot. Some of them are old, and many are new. The old ones are pictures from my grandparents' house in Calcutta, most of them in black and white. You know those large hard-bound albums made up of sheets of thick, dull-black chartpaper, into which the photos are pasted using those stiff gummed triangles referred to a long time ago as photo-corners? Well, anyway, the photos I've been looking at are the ones that somehow escaped being pasted into one of those albums. Or perhaps they're the ones that have, over the last few years, been picked out of many different such albums by my aunt (my grandmother died in 1998; the house is now my aunt's). In any case, they're a mixed-up bunch of pictures, spilling out of some four different envelopes that are beginning to tear at the edges, but more or less ensconced in the large brown folder my aunt has chosen for them.

I spent my first hour with the folder thumbing through the pictures slowly, absorbing the faded edges of the one, the ageing blacks of another. I looked at my aunts and uncles and parents and cousins as they were 30-odd-years ago, versions of them that I had grown up with but blotted out slowly, replacing them with inevitable older ones. I discovered moments in the lives of my grandparents that I had heard about in family stories, but didn't know there were pictures of. And of course, each photograph is a story.

There is the first trip to Kashmir in 1946, my nana and nani framed for the first time as a couple — he looking young and slightly bemused, wearing a sleeveless sweater a little too tight for him, ending at his waist to reveal loose pleated trousers; she attempting a tentative smile, in a collared woollen coat tightly buttoned over her sari. There is nothing in the background that might establish the locale — an electric switchboard, and the fragment of an arch. Only the warm clothes indicate where they might be — my grandparents were married in mid-April, and even if they went a week or a month later, the weather in Kashmir must still have been cool. Nani's too-warm coat speaks of the first-time traveller expecting the worst, but her happily windswept hair and the huge bunches of wildflowers reveal a young Calcuttan gladly surprised by spring in Sonamarg.
At the bottom of this picture, staring frankly out at us is a little boy. My mama: the seven-year-old child of my grandfather's late first wife. My nana was a widower and a nationalist reformer who had vowed that if he married again, it would be a widow: he practiced the widow remarriage he campaigned for so avidly. My nani was a child widow who had managed to return to her parents' home and thence to school. When they married, my uncle was brought back from his grandparental home in Jaipur to live with them. It is a photograph that captures the gauche, idealistic beginning of a life experiment together.

There are other pictures of my grandparents: another one taken in Kashmir looks like it is a few years later, with my nana now gravely filling out a black sherwani. My nani no longer looks young and dishevelled, caught unawares: her new smile is quietly confident, and her sari pallu emerges out of a new coat, draping itself lightly over her head like a scarf. There are freshly-cut flowers in this picture, too, but a tidier, smaller bunch, held dignifiedly at waist-level. Seen alongside the previous picture, everything here signals a transition into mature domesticity.

The pictures in the folder feel like signposts, marking points along my grandparents' journey together, as well as moments of individual achievement for both — a trip to the Acropolis, a meeting with Nehru, a political speech, a commemorative function, a family reunion.

Looking at them got me thinking about how clearly photographs once demarcated experience. The camera was still rare enough that using it involved choosing in advance which moments out of the flow of everyday life were deemed worthy of stillness, of capturing in perpetuity. Of course, that process of decision-making also edited out many things: the serious and the important were usually chosen over the playful, the normal.

Now the camera is so ubiquitous that we take photographs of everything all the time: not just marriages and meetings, children and pets and ourselves on holiday, but restaurant food and meals cooked oneself, shop signs, new flowers in the garden. And then we put them on Facebook.

But no matter how much the context has changed, that desire to reflect experience back onto ourselves is left over from the old idea of photographs as signposts. It's as if the more photos we take, the more eventful our lives will themselves become. But of course, the opposite happens. Pictures lose their value as signposts. They cease to mark eventfulness. Italo Calvino cottoned onto the profound, disturbing irony of it all as far back as 1958. "The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow."

Now, as I look through another folder — this time a virtual one — of my own photographs from a summer in Kashmir, I think about Calvino and try to decide which is which. As I bring my many hundreds of images down to a shareable fifty, I arrive at the terrible truth: earlier we edited our lives to take pictures. Now we edit pictures to create our lives.

Post Facto -- Used Goods: Cities, capitalism and the obsolescence of things

My Sunday Guardian column this fortnight:

	mong the numerous imaginative triumphs of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is Leonia, the city which refashions itself every day. "[E]very morning people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-unwrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck." "It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new," wrote Calvino. In his brilliantly prescient fashion, Calvino seemed to see how the world of high capitalism was weirdly beginning to echo one of the oldest forms of economic activity, one that that it had derided as irrational and in fact banned — the Native American practice of potlatch, in which your status was measured by how much you could give away, or sometimes, destroy. The vision that Calvino conjured up in 1972 — of a world in which the enjoyment of newness is built upon the pleasure of discarding the old — is no longer one we need to see in our imaginations. We all live in Leonia now. The cycle of capitalist production sustains itself on the inbuilt obsolescence of things: the replacement of something rather than its repair, and the throwing away of objects as outdated even if they are still in perfect working order, is integral to hypermodernity. And yet, it's not entirely clear to me that the things we throw away should be seen as being outside capitalism. It's probably true that the used-goods market operates on the fringes of capitalist production proper, but surely the very idea of the second-hand emerges from a capitalist vision of the world in which things aren't automatically assumed to be passed on through generations, a vision that marks these goods as having a (perceived-as-illegitimate) second life? { The cycle of capitalist production sustains itself on the inbuilt obsolescence of things: the replacement of something rather than its repair. In Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, among the most remarkable texts ever published about a 19th century city, the second-hand market already occupies a fair bit of space. Originally published in 1851, Mayhew's mammoth three-volume exploration of Victorian London is among the most detailed, illuminating and entertaining sociological records of the street life of any modern city. The desire to create an exhaustive urban compendium marks Mayhew as a man of his time: he categorised the "street folk", "those who obtain a living in the streets of the metropolis", into six types: street-sellers; street-buyers; street-finders; street-performers, artists and showmen; street-artisans, or working pedlars; and street-labourers. The street sellers include separate sections on sellers of second-hand metal articles, second-hand musical instruments, second-hand weapons, second-hand telescopes and pocket glasses, second-hand curiosities (which seems to mean coins, buckles and shells like the cowrie which were "money in India, for his father was a soldier and had been there and saw it"), and a huge section on second-hand clothes that was further subdivided by neighbourhood, wholesale or retail, and so on.
	ut this encyclopaedic bent led neither to a dull listing of facts, nor lofty theorising. Instead, the book displays a marvelous ability to turn each encounter into a vignette. Mayhew had begun his writing career as a dramatist, which may account for his superb ear for dialogue—the attention he gives a memorable turn of phrase, the fearless mimicking of accents. And it is in his recounting of something a second-hand clothes seller says to him that we find this telling detail: "If people gets to wear them low-figured things, more and more, as they possibly may, why where's the second hand things to come from?" Already then, in the 1840s, the complaint about thinner and poorer cloth is linked to things that are seen as being in vogue — "them new-fashioned named things often is so—and so they show when hard-worn". The second-hand market today seems either to cater to the highest-end consumer, whose desire is for objects whose survival in time has somehow lifted them out of their older economic circuits and placed them on a different plane of value — or to the lowest-end consumer, who cannot afford the new, even the cheapest, mass-produced new. But even as the second-hand object, the reusable whole, gets rarer, what we have more and more of is trash—stuff that must be dismantled, torn apart into its various constituents, in order to be plugged back into the cycle of production: recycled. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that in Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers, probably among the most remarkable texts yet produced about a 21st century city, the recycler's gaze is pervasive. A boy wears a shiny oval belt buckle "of promising recyclable weight"; a stretch of the airport road is "unhelpfully clean"; a hotel brochure advertising for a New Year's party is printed on "glossy paper, for which recyclers paid two rupees per kilo". The scavengers and waste-pickers of Annawadi have no access to the products (or lifestyles) advertised in the post-globalisation megacity—until they have been turned into garbage. In imaginary Leonia, the street cleaners were welcomed like angels. In our all-too-real version, they have been banished beyond the city's borders, only allowed in take away the trash.