India’s First Photo Festival

Everybody’s snaps attract an audience online, but the Delhi Photo Festival offers image-makers one that’s democratic and discerning

Ever since the Chobi Mela was established in Bangladesh in 2000, annually transforming the side-streets, shaadi pandals and rickshaws of Dhaka into mobile galleries, photo festivals have been springing up all across South Asia. They’ve quickened pace over the past four years, with Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia and several cities in China getting their own international photo festivals. This October, India will too, with the Delhi Photo Festival 2011, a week-long series of discussions, workshops and exhibitions on the theme of ‘affinity’, submissions for which may be sent before 15 July.

Seasoned photographers Dinesh Khanna and Prashant Panjiar, of the NGO Nazar Foundation, are behind the venture. They want it to be a big, buzzy extrapolation of the Nazar Ka Adda, a monthly presentation and discussion event they hold at Delhi’s cafes and bookstores. As befitting a dramatically democratising medium, Panjiar says he’d like the photo festival to appeal to professionals, amateurs and hobbyists, sort of like a Jaipur Litfest of photography. “I think that’s a good example to follow,” he says, “because it attracts the general reader, and we believe photography is the only truly democratic art. With digital technology, everyone’s a photographer.”

Despite his two-decade long association with photography, and his own energy-intensive progress through it, Panjiar isn’t a be-grudger of the “banalised” image—as plentiful, endlessly replicated and discardable as the cheap gizmos that produce it. “Just look at the big news events over the last few years,” says Panjiar. “From the tsunami to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, most of [these photos] have come from someone who had a cellphone and happened to be standing on the beach, or at the blast. I say, more power to the people.” For professionals too, a cellphone camera can have an edge over an SLR’s inquisitorial telephoto lens. “It’s a good way to be unobtrusive if you want to capture endearing family photos, or get access in a conflict zone.”

Today, the prodigiousness of our image-making is matched by the unprecedented rapaciousness of our visual appetites. Nobody needs to be a Cartier-Bresson to command an audience of millions. No matter how arbitrary or undistinguished our subject matter, social networking sites have democratised our ability to become ‘popular’ producers of images. But there’s a vast world of difference between having seen something visually stimulating, and clicking listlessly through images of slumbering dogs, cats, babies, and sun-poached significant others on vacation with mounting irritation and self-loathing. “The explosion of TV programming doesn’t mean it’s all quality programming,” says Khanna. “Software and technology take care of basic competence, so anyone can take what looks like a good picture. Today’s photographers go straight to the art. They have to look for something different in the moment, in the frame, in the subject, because of the pressure that instantaneity brings to their work.” To command notice through the pitiless click-click-yawn cycle, photographers need to ask themselves some tough questions. “If you’re a professional photographer, and you can’t answer ‘Why am I doing this?’ you may as well pack up and go home,” says Panjiar.

Not that anyone on Facebook will suggest anything quite so indelicate. “Absolutely stupid work is passed off as artistic or avant garde,” says Panjiar, “because Facebook isn’t the space for real critique, just like the drawing room isn’t the space to talk about affairs. Look at the response everything gets: ‘Wow!’ ‘Love it!’ Everyone needs validation, I get that. But what’s the point of serious photographers putting up work just to get praise for it?”

While there’ll certainly be some praise to be had for young photographers exhibiting their work at the Delhi Photo Festival, there’ll also be equal amounts of spirited debate. That’s how Khanna and Panjiar hope that photography will rise above the “craft” that it’s taught as, to be used as a considered, critical art. 

The festival will be held at the India Habitat Centre over 15-28 October. More at delhiphotofestival.com

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Shruti Ravindran