Gritty Gloss

Indian fashion photography is not just about good looks anymore. Getting down and dirty is in vogue

Indian fashion photography is not just about good looks anymore. Getting down and dirty is in vogue

OUR NEEDS are simple. We want a photographer to take a dress, make the girl look pretty, give us lots of images to choose from, and not give any attitude. Photographers, if they’re any good, want to create art.” But even though Anna Wintour’s grip on international fashion (she’s editor of the US edition of Vogue) is nowhere close to loosening, fashion photographers on the domestic scene are busy endorsing “attitude”—the stuff she frowns upon with such clipped certainty.

Then again, Indian fashion is something else altogether. And if it joins Bollywood as a cultural export, it will be because of precisely that. It’s unique.

Naturally, Indian photographers see a distinctive evolutionary curve for themselves. Which will be especially resistant to easy stereotyping as well. It’s no longer about pretty pictures of pretty people with perfect hair puckered up before a perfectly distempered wall. There’s that touch of grunge, for instance. Though models are still posing by the poolside, ruins of burnt down mills in Mumbai, autos in Delhi, peeling plaster and paan-stained walls are some of the sights against which poses are struck these days. A frame without gritty realism just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.

Even as fashion photographers in the West trace urban and suburban narratives, those in India are exploiting contrast. So you have a model in a couture gown with a jaw-dropping price tag surrounded by the abject misery of a slum. Cocktail gowns sweeping the dirt, high heels piercing the sludge and Bvlgari jewels shining forth from the most dimly lit of ghettos. Or, you have torn denims, unstructured bomber jackets and Mohawks—again, with some of Real India to complete the frame. As Harper’s Bazaar India’s editor Sujata Assomull says, “Fashion in India is coming of age and fashion photography was bound to follow.”

Fashion photographer Anand Seth has shot contrast to great effect for designers like Arjun Khanna and Abhishek Gupta-Nandita Basu. “Unlike the US or Europe, India does not have an element of high fashion on the street, apart from bandhini skirts,” he says. “The dirty buildings and poverty-induced filth provide the precise contrast to glamour. You put a model in a beautiful designer dress before a filthy wall, or on a pot-holed road and it immediately catches your attention because you cross that street every day.” The amazing thing about the outdoors, he feels, is the unpredictability. That’s what gives his pictures character, as he sees it.

For a while, the grunge look was the preserve of fashion spreads in glossy magazines. Now, they’ve crept into the collection shoots of designers and are even being used for mass-audience advertising. Prasad Naik’s shoot for Killer jeans is just one example.

Yet, the street feel is also beginning to fall into the deadened clasp of a template. But simply abandoning the perfect Barbie Girl world is not the idea. Moreover, some of it can get so contrived that it evokes more revulsion than admiration. The Indian edition of Vogue had a shoot in Rajasthan that showed villagers with Hermes bags and kids in Fendi bibs. The boos are still coming in.

When contrast works, it works well. Riddhibrata Burman’s Paolo Canali shoot for GQ, India, in Chandni Chowk had the fashion fraternity marveling. Bharat Sikka’s grungey take on couture for Vogue was appreciated too. In fact, such was the response that Sikka lays claim to contrast as his own intellectual property.

The change though, insists Anaita Shroff Adajania, stylist and fashion director of Vogue India and the brain behind Vogue’s shoots, is courtesy the fashion magazines coming to town with their emphasis on conceptualisation. “When we do shoots, they’re not done by whichever photographer is free… with whatever model or hair stylist you can find. Fashion shoots are important and we budget them well. Also, that means many photographers who were otherwise not open to doing editorial shoots, now are.”

What gets Sikka worked up, meanwhile, is the dumbing down of the concept of contrast. Many photographers are using contrast just for the heck of it, he complains. “Some photographers are definitely doing experimental work,” he says, “but all their shoots are done after lifting a concept from a magazine, not the streets of India, where they shoot.”

Photographer Tarun Khiwal also has a bone to pick. “There’s a whole lot of crap happening— it’s suddenly
becoming only about tweaking colours and making pictures ‘edgy’. There are photographers whose signature style changes every day depending on what magazine they are reading.” What really gets Khiwal’s goat is Photoshop work passed off as fashion photography.

With DSLR cameras and Google’s ready referencing, fashion photography does look like a breeze to wannabes. But like fashion, its photography is and must remain an art form—not to be trifled with. For that, the uniqueness must hold meaning, and let us not lose sight of that.

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