Farming on Facebook, Camera-less Food Photography and a New Indian Pastoral

Abstract

Lacunae in media images and reports of death and agrarian based suffering, experienced by India's debt prone farmers, have only begun to be addressed in the Indian news media. While the agrarian crisis is spectacularized through 24 hour news cycle images, analysis of underlying causes is less common in print and digital media. Kheti Badi, a photo-series produced from screenshots of FarmVille (an Adobe Flash gaming application on Facebook), interrogates this media impasse. It critiques homogenized images of food and farming, which rise to the top of web search results, and photojournalistic images showing the dignified suffering of Indian agricultural workers. Kheti Badi's computer made images are an alternative to visual stereotyping of rural India in photojournalism. Its technological inventiveness neither spectacularizes farmer protests or suicides nor aestheticizes pastoral qualities associated with the land. To make visible the changing nature of food production and need to reform farming in India, and its media coverage, Kheti Badi supplants the Indian pastoral with a new pictorial.