The visible influence of images

“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

— Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’

I’ve a studio image of my grandmother carrying a georgette sari, perched on the picket wings of a chair. My grandfather is seated on a chair, his white beard cascading on his well-stitched achkan. A portrait of marital bliss, structured and constructed across the ornate chair. Bathed in sepia tones, this picture ignited an curiosity in images. Many of us could have reminiscences of going to a village truthful and getting photographed in keeping with a fantasy backdrop — the Taj Mahal or the favorite hero of the occasions.

Digital-era smartphones and social media have turned everybody right into a photographer. Instagram zombies with filtered selfies flip photos of consuming or dancing at a marriage or in a restaurant into private billboards.

Photography, to me, has all the time been each reportage and artwork — solely the steadiness has shifted dramatically over time. In the start (1830s-Nineteen Forties), images was a documentary instrument. It was the primary medium that might freeze actuality with mechanical precision and was pressed into service as proof, information, record-keeping: warfare images, crime scenes, studio portraits of the rich. The thought of it being “art” was controversial.

Early sceptics dismissed it as a soulless craft, whereas rebels just like the Pictorialists, a time period attributed to a approach of working the place the photographer manipulated {a photograph} relatively than merely recording it, protested in opposition to this simplified labelling. As every {photograph} concerned intervention, the standing of images went via a shift, and it started to be recognised as a respectable type of advantageous artwork.

Post-World War II, Henri Cartier-Bresson emphasised on capturing the “decisive moment”. Known as the daddy of recent photojournalism, he was one of the crucial influential avenue photographers of twentieth century.  He was globally recognised for his protection of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral in 1948. His photos grew to become pictorial essays that elevated reportage to one thing poetic and subjective. The ‘decisive moment’ wasn’t simply capturing actuality — it was composing it.

Photography didn’t kill ‘realism’ in portray, it unchained it. Impressionists like Monet and Renoir ditched photo-perfect realism with the dictum to color what one perceives relatively than what one sees. No extra portrait drudgery in stuffy studios. Canvases and easels have been taken outdoor and painters captured the altering gentle and fleeting shadows — Van Gogh’s swirling clouds, Cezanne’s geometric mountains, Gauguin’s primal desires.

The axiom {that a} image is price a thousand phrases rings true. Several iconic pictures from India’s historical past seize profound human ache and have turn into symbols of bigger socio-political tragedies, highlighting points like industrial negligence, communal violence, colonial oppression, and compelled displacement. Some pictures sear themselves into our minds and coronary heart, embodying a complete tragedy in a single body.

Images of Partition hang-out. Refugees cramped in each out there house in trains together with a caravan of humanity; kids and the aged carried by their households; their scant belongings — these pictures go away an imprint far past the body.

The picture of a mud-caked youngster, the face barely seen, captured the horrors of the Bhopal fuel tragedy. It grew to become an abiding picture stamped on the consciousness of the nation. Similarly, the determined pleading of a Muslim man amid the Gujarat riots distilled the violence of this darkish chapter into one unforgettable second. These pictures don’t simply doc private struggling however have formed public reminiscence and discourse round accountability, justice and reconciliation in India’s socio-political historical past.

My want to put in writing about images stems from a current guide launch: of Prof Bhupinder Brar’s ‘Time and Transience’. It captures via a photographic narrative a ‘stillness’ and ‘waiting’ that comes from private loss and grief. The guide captures fleeting moments of human vulnerability and the uncooked realisation of forgotten moments. The guide doesn’t merely report actuality, however makes us pause, observe and join with the extraordinary hidden silently throughout the on a regular basis.

Artist Pushpamala N has additionally intrigued me. Known for her performative images and video works, she often engages with Hindu mythology whereas drawing stylistic inspiration from theatrical traditions, together with Parsi theatre.

She creates photographic works the place she embodies each photographer and efficiency artiste, blurring the strains between topic and object. In her collection ‘Phantom Lady’ (1996-1998), shot in Bombay, she performs a masked Zorro-like determine trying to rescue her twin sister from the mafia. This cheekily referenced Fearless Nadia (Mary Ann Evans), the pre-Independence stunt girl, iconic for the movie ‘Hunterwali’. In this 1935 movie, a masked Nadia portrayed a vigilante princess in search of justice.

Pushpamala treats every body as a meticulously crafted mise en scene, turning the static medium of images right into a dynamic intersection of theatre, efficiency and storytelling. Her pictures are elaborate productions: she researches, scripts, designs costumes with painted backdrops, usually casting herself because the central performer. Her pictures resemble a frozen stage play.

She re-enacts or subverts mythological narratives, performing archetypal roles from epics like ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’. ‘Avega — The Passion’, a 2012 collection, is a tableaux-based photo-performance exploring three feminine characters from the ‘Ramayana’ — Sita, Surpanakha and Kaikeyi.

Her apply total treats images as a theatrical stage, subverting mythological and historic tropes with wit and chutzpah. Often known as ‘the most entertaining iconoclast of contemporary Indian art’, she makes an attempt to subvert the dominant discourse via her photograph and video performances.

The celebrated photographer of Chandigarh, Diwan Manna, wears many hats. Beyond his lens, he has formed the cultural panorama of Chandigarh because the inventive curator and administrator of the Lalit Kala Akademi. His work displays his imaginative and prescient that  will get epitomised within the truism — “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Photography, for him, rejects the passive aim-and-shoot mentality. It calls for a deliberate association of actuality, the place gentle, composition and intent sculpt the fleeting into the everlasting.

Manna’s pictures hover between surrealism and spirituality, laced with an estranging whimsy that defies straightforward categorisation. A wild area of grass with a size of white fabric fluttering within the breeze, languid girls bathed in diaphanous gentle; silhouette swaying throughout cracked partitions and shadows lurking furtively blur the road between what’s seen and what’s imagined.

His signature negative-positive manipulations — flipping tones to merge darkish and lightweight — counsel an internal gaze turned outward in silent contemplation. These works really feel haunting, typically ghostly, as if peering into parallel realms.

For Manna, the digicam isn’t any mere field however a mirror reflecting the multidimensional world he inhabits. It forces you to see past the floor, the place on a regular basis objects — discarded saris, rusted bicycles, silent benches — turn into portals to existential musings. His course of is meditative: lengthy exposures seize breath-like actions, whereas double exposures layer realities.

Photography is certainly an artwork kind that enriches the inventive pantheon, and just like the sepia portrait of my grandparents endures not as a relic, however as a genteel reminiscence of an period passed by. From Bhopal’s anguish to Brar’s grief, Pushpamala’s myths to Manna’s quirkiness — images stitches our tales into collective reminiscence.

— The author is a theatre director