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 21st 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”.
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