Photography

Abstract

The need to define a unique cultural identity has plagued accounts of photography in the region. I will suggest the need to focus on a more complex experience, tracking how photography developed through the circulation of photographs and photographers, as part of complicated global flows, alliances and collaborations, regional networks and exchanges, and the ‘make-do’ culture of technical innovation, repair and recycling. I also place emphasis on how photographic practice works in connection with other media, be it in photographic production, circulation, or display. In the process, I hope these stories located in South Asia will reframe thinking about photography as it has been recounted in European and North American histories. Today, the smartphone revolution of the 21st century has created an entirely new constituency of camera-proficient users without the pre-requisites of computer literacy. As we witness people across class, caste and gender taking ‘selfies’ or making pictures using Apps and posting them on social media, it is hard to imagine that photography once had a more exclusive history in the region. Lens-based practices arrived in South Asia almost simultaneously with North America and Europe, but there was never a ‘Kodak moment’ as self-owned cameras were limited to the elite. In contrast, proprietor-owned studios became aspirational and phantasmatic spaces to be photographed in. Early scholarship on popular vernacular practices emphasised a corporeal and affective engagement with hybrid images as opposed to a more distanced modernist imagination in the ‘West’ (Pinney, 1997, 2004). But professional photography grew in diverse directions in the subcontinent that included multiple practices and genres such as photo-journalism, documentary, industrial and commercial work as well as intermedial art works. Photography as a global form participated in the making, remaking and unmaking of identities, often through coordinates that extended beyond the borders of the ‘nation state’. Thus Sunil Janah who began his career as a photographer for publications of the Communist Party of India such as People’s War entered into a collaboration with Life photographer Margaret Bourke White (Rahman, 2010). Other visitors such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Gedney or Werner Bischof also made iconic images in and of India (Gaskell & Gujral, 2018). A fascinating archive of publicity photographs and production stills discovered recently is that of the German cinematographer Josef Wirsching, who was involved from 1934 in setting up the major film studio, Bombay