Picture Perfect

AMONG THE MANY striking, soaked-in-his-tory artefacts at Guru- gram’s Museo Camera’s latest exhibition Touching Light: A Prelude to the Bicentennial of Pho- tography (1827-2027), is a series of studio portraits captured by the firm Bourne and Shepherd (B&S). The exhibition is a celebration of analogue photography and B&S, one of the oldest photographic businesses in the world, which were popular in India in the 1860s. Their stu- dio photographs give us an invaluable window into the lives of both Indians and the British during the colonial era (they famously shot a much-used author image for Rudyard Kipling, for exam- ple). Women bedecked with jewellery and dressed in elaborate clothing staring defiantly into the camera, successive generations of merchant families posing together, British officers in full military regalia — these ‘postcards’ from the past offer a certain texture of lived reality that even the most well-meaning historians sometimes fail to capture.

Touching Light is a thoughtfully com- piled and beautifully presented selection of analogue photography from India. It combines historical artefacts like the B&S series with works by 28 contempo- rary Indian photographers, including Ram Rahman, Prashant Panjiar, Rohit Chawla, Serena Chopra, Bandeep Singh et al. The exhibition has been conceptualised and curated by vet- eran photographer and Museo Camera founder-director Aditya Arya. Having started his career in 1980, Arya shot on film for 25 years before making the switch to digital. He retains an abiding fondness and deep respect for analogue photography—not just in terms of aes- thetic and technological achievements, but also its role in shaping the history and evolution of the medium.

“I want people to connect the histori- cal dots,” says Arya during an interview. “Often, I meet scholars and writers who have written beautifully on images and photography. But they don’t know how the actual camera equipment worked. When they come to the museum, I give them the actual camera used by photographers (in the past) and ask them to shoot. It’s then that you realise why the photographer created certain images in the way that they did, what were the technological constraints of the era that forced him to shape the image in a specific way.”

A great example of the exhibition’s historicity as well as the tech-evolution aspect is the work of the pioneering Italian-British photographer Felice Beato, also known as Felix Beato (1832-1909). One of the first well-known war photographers in the world, Beato crafted unforgettable images from the 1857 First War of Independence as well as the Second Opium War. Beato produced albumen silver prints using wet collodion (or ‘wet-plate’ process) glass-plate negatives. This technique required photographic material to be coated, exposed and developed within a span of 15 minutes, because of which photographers had to set up portable darkrooms to use in the field.

“Here at Museo Camera, we teach those older photographic processes occasionally,” says Arya. “It would sometimes take an hour or two to set up a darkroom in the field, it was a delicate process. Salt print, egg albumen print, wet plate, we want people to learn these techniques firsthand. And why? Because whenyoulearntheseprocessesfirst- hand, you’ll say, ‘wow, this really was difficult to pull off back in the day!’”

But when it came to 1857, Beato also faced constraints of a different sort—he only arrived in India in 1858, after most of the bloodshed was over. There were only so many hollowed-out streets and damaged buildings Beato could shoot. Eventually he took to staging dramatic scenes. For one of his most famous photographs, Interior of the Secundra Bagh After the Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels (1858), Beato had corpses of dead Indian sepoys exhumed and placed in the courtyard of the Sikander Bagh Palace in Lucknow, the site of a massacre. That photograph is part of the Beato display at Touching Light. Beato’s staging and its history also teach us the difference between “struc- tured” and “unstructured” photography, or as Arya puts it, between “created”
and “found” images. Into the former category goes advertising, promotional and film photography, where the photographer controls every aspect of the environment—the background, the lighting, and so on. Whereas in the latter, the photographer captures an unplanned image in the moment,  contextualising it as they deem fit. Within Touching Light, there are several stellar portfolios of both kinds.

For example, in the archival section featuring the works of the Hindustan Times veteran N Thiagarajan, there are several exceptional ‘found’ images featuringworking-classpeoplegoing about their everyday lives. An image of a woman winnowing grain in the sun, an- other showing a labourer reading a letter next to the massive metallic chain-links he presumably helped manufacture. Through Prashant Panjiar’s remarkable photographs of the dacoits of Chambal Valley, we see how photojournalism

as a practice emerges out of the ‘found’ image (ditto for T Narayan’s images of the Uttarkashi earthquake of 1991). There is an inescapable fragility in these images of surly, moustachioed, heavily armed men looking right at the camera, washing up by a stream or negotiating terms of sur- render with government officials.

And at the same time, you have Neeraj Priyadarshi’s gorgeous images of a young Shah Rukh Khan casually lighting up a cigarette during the production of Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindu- stani (2000). His photographs of Deepti Naval are every bit as eye-catching, the actress radiating a quiet intelligence from the frame. Bandeep Singh’s im- ages of actor Naseeruddin Shah and Bharatnatyam maestro Navtej Johar are in a similar vein.

Arya’s own career (as well as the selections from his work displayed here), shows us the ways in which he has incorporated influences from both commercial and artistic photography. “My own journey has taken me to both kinds of images, ‘found’ and ‘created’,” said Arya. “I have been a photographer for over 40 years now. I have worked in advertising, with filmmakers and at the same time I have also ‘created’ images.

I have travelled across Ladakh, I have photographed Naga communities. It was the advertising work and the commercial work that financed all the other things I wanted to work on. Also, I feel that the occupants of these categories keep changing with time. Portraiture was once all about ‘found’ images, but now it’s mostly ‘created.’”

The kind of ‘old-school’ portraiture style Arya is referring to in that last line can be observed in Harbans Mody’s ‘Dilli Ki Shaan’ (literally, ‘pride of Delhi’) series of photo-graphs from 2005-2006, a few of which are a part of Touching Light. This photo-series has a unique focus—on photographing Delhi’s centenarians, men and women who have seen over a hundred summers and therefore have a uniquely holistic perspective on the trajectory of India
as a nation-state. To underline Delhi’s diversity and communal harmony, Mody included senior citizens from all the major religions.

It’s also touching to see convergent themes emerging from the exhibiting photographers’ accompanying personal statements, mounted next to their respec- tive displays. Most of them are self-taught, for one, studying math or science or litera- ture at college originally—the pedagogy of photography courses in India is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of them speak wistfully of the romance of the darkroom, the suspense of not knowing how a photograph will turn out before it is fully developed.

By the time you finish taking in Touch- ing Light, you realise just how influential analogue techniques continue to be in other artistic realms—the most promi- nent being filmmaking. The glass-plate negatives on display here reminded me, for instance, of how the visual appear- ance of these negatives would be used to convey flashbacks in 1980s and ’90s Indian cinema.

Touching Light shows us just how driven photographers can be in the face of adverse circumstances, limited resources and technological lacunae. It is a trip down memory lane, yes, but it is so much more. The images and behind-the-scenes mementoes on display here amount to a unique visual text — an alternate history of Indian image-making that centres the tactile with constantly surprising results.

(Touching Light: A Prelude to the Bicentennial of Photography (1827–2027) runs at Museo Camera, Centre for the Photographic Arts, Gurugram, till September 29)

Akash DasBandeep SinghphotographyPrashant PanjiarRam RahmanRohit ChawlaSerena Chopra