“Drawn from Light: Early Photography and the Indian Sub-continent” — currently on display at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts — introduces one to the traditions of landscape and portraiture photography in India. These 200 never-seen-before images create a compelling multi-layered narrative and shed light on the socio-cultural aspect of the Indian sub-continent. Rahaab Allana of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, from whose archives the photographs were sourced, has co-curated the show with Beth Citron of Rubin Museum and Davy Depelchin of Royal Fine Art Museum. Excerpts from an e-mail interview with Allana:
Earlier exhibitions that you curated have examined photographic practices in South Asia. So how is this exhibition different?
This exhibition tries to showcase some of the most iconic works of the South Asian region from the 19th century without trying to showcase a micro history. It is an effort to provide a synoptic view of the visual history available, as a preliminary foray into the earliest surviving samples of the portrait and the landscape, the two most prevalent tropes of image production at the time. Works from Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Nepal have never been seen in their original formats here and we’re trying to unpack the history of the subcontinent through exchanges that occurred in media, art practice and journalistic ways. The discourse is about understanding the afterlife of an image. In our present, we are consumed in an era of mass observation, but the photograph as a particular kind of image is aide-memoire, has always made us even more aware of a fraction of time and a sliver of light in marking memories, and re-forging lost alliances. It is the culmination of commitments to seeking a horizon line, that of a collective history, ever pushing the range and depth of a circulating, in-transit, shared and at times, hidden image.
How has the exhibition been curated?
The exhibition is divided into two main sections: Statuesque Enthrallment, and Borders Bastions and Bridges. Through a number of portraits, the former reaches for a physical and perhaps psychological understanding of the human condition in countries like Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal and, of course, how they are tied via photographers to India. The latter showcases landscape as sweeping visual sojourns; documentary surveys that at one time enhanced the visual database of advancing troops, surgeons and doctors in the colonial era in search of territory, cure, and adventure. The idea was to think about the following: As the first analog image was produced over 160 years ago and digital one almost 40 years ago, is there a more profound reading, a shifting lexicon of shooting, a more abstract sensibility that can be applied to images as fact, as literacy, as collectible and as instigators of analysis? Have the past several years shown us a tangible connection between analog thinking and digital practice?
It features the work of photographers like Felice Beato, one of the earliest war photographers; Richard Gordon Matzene, the first foreigner to photograph the royal family of Nepal; Alexander Greenlaw’s images of the ruins of the Vijaynagara kingdom; and John Murray who clicked the first-ever images of Taj Mahal). Do they have any common meeting ground?
All these photographers lived around the 1850s, except for Matzene whose image is from the 1930s. This region was seen by a succession of photographers – European, and Asian. They were drawn primarily from a group of military men, medical officers and later professionals with commercially-driven enterprises. They travelled extensively in Asia and generated an immense narrative, one might say, of regional and spatial connections that would have allowed them to transgress the bounds of their own national identity, creating a unified visual thesaurus of Asia. South Asia, as we see through some of the images, slowly transformed into British India and was brought to life through aerial, engineering, landscape and people photography.
What’s the relevance of having an iPad and false backdrops?
The interactive iPad is for people to take images of themselves against false backdrops and for us to load them on the web with time. In 20 years, if someone decides to type in South Asian photography, some of these images may pop up thereby asking us to question the role of the archive. As we are now in a world of social media, the notion of a shifting identity and porous cultures is important to consider. Taking a person out of context and giving him/her a new backdrop makes for a parallel consciousness about the self. Images are not only oblique insinuators of a cultural threshold, an interpretive means, the images in the archive are contemporary objects, always negotiating time and history. The image impermanently sealed on a surface continues to be the most adaptable object of our times, taking on renewed identities with changing ownership, authorship and evolving circumstances. The image is no more stationary; but, as the photograph, where can it go, what are the aesthetic and practical boundaries it can recalibrate? In teasing out these ideas, I have realised that curating them is about the social construction of an evolving world.
What kind of parallels can you draw between the photography in India and its neighbours?
The mapping of the subcontinent — the ramparts of Thanjavur or the view of people in Myanmar — rendered the setting/person accessible, navigable and a cherished possession that, in photographic form, was exportable. The cultural mechanism deployed through images, hence, also represents a historicising process. Museumised vistas articulate a supposedly unchanging and timeless portrait of places in the form of collectibles that were eventually retained in many of the national archives in Europe.
However, the insertion of native subjects by the photographers within these pictures does more than just contribute to the scale or provide a “vernacular emphasis” to these images; it underscores the unseen, yet fraught, relationship between land, communities and the imperial vision.
What are the different kind of photographic practices and processes that are part of the show?
The daguerreotype: This is a photograph on a copper plate covered with a layer of finely polished silver. The image material consists of tiny particles deposited on the polished silver surface. These slightly off-white particles form the image highlights by diffusing the reflection of light that falls on the finished plate. Depending on the viewing angle, a daguerreotype can appear as either a positive or a negative.
Photo montage: William Johnson, a Founder-Member and Secretary of the Bombay Photographic Society (estd. 1854) and Editor of its journal. He was believed to have operated a daguerreotype studio on Grant Road from 1852-1854 and a photographic studio from 1855-1860 with William Henderson briefly as his partner for the second endeavour. He edited The Oriental Races and Tribes, Residents and Visitors of Bombay , an early ethnographic album published in 1863 and 1866. It features montage images, set against photographic backdrops that range from the façade of a building, a sweeping landscape to those depicting a painted backdrop. From these playfully created images emerges an equally complex tableau of ‘world making’, bringing together notions of iconicity, identity and even citizenship through a re-manifested photographic format.
Wax Paper negatives of the Taj and Vijayanagara: During the mid-1850s Alexander Greenlaw made over 100 wax paper negatives, as the he seeks positions and elevations that adequately manifest his grasp of the landscape in Hampi with the rugged and heavy equipment he would have been carrying. His negatives have been rendered in remarkable formats, which indicate small lens apertures for sharpness and long exposures — 15x12 inches (38x30.5cm) and 18 x16 inches (46 x 41cm).
Platinum prints: The image of Shan Chiefs of Burma was taken during the 1903 Coronation Durbar in Delhi by Bourne and Shepherd. The image is a platinum print, which is a technique discovered by Richard Willis in 1873. The process was based upon the light-sensitive properties of iron salts forming an image, on an uncoated paper, made visible by conversion into metallic platinum (or palladium). The resultant image is considered to be highly stable and permanent.
Drawn from Light: Early Photography and the Indian Sub-continent is on show at Twin Art Gallery, IGNCA, Janpath, New Delhi, till September 30.
