Ever since the ’70s, the Mahajans have been photographing the busloads of tourists who visit Birla Mandir in New Delhi. Their tribe is a fast vanishing one, now that every-one is a photographer and everyone has a camera.
Amit Mahajan has seen photographic technologies change over the decades as he and his father, Braj Bhushan, froze hundreds of images of passing visitors for posterity. Today, the family’s vintage box camera, the sort where the photographer disappeared behind a cloth to everyone’s vast amusement, is something of a museum piece. It is brought out and used only on the odd occasion when someone requests an out-of-the box image.
The camera that used to be so common at melas and tourist sites now sits unassumingly in a corner at Alkazi Foundation’s ‘The Surface of Things: Photography in Process’ photo exhibition, elegant as well as defiant of the new world of instant image-making. And the archived silver gelatin and polaroid images it produced over the decades have become source material for Uzma Mohsin’s photo series ‘A Minute of Make-Believe’.
The exhibition, being hosted at Alliance Francaise de Delhi, features her and a number of other photographers and artistes, including Edson Benny Dias, Srinivas Kuruganti and Sukanya Ghosh. Curator Rahaab Allana describes it as an attempt to initiate a dialogue between digital and analogue photography..
There is a renewed creative interest in analogue among not just photographers, but also artistes using digital and social media because those fragile photos in our albums and old frames are more than just the play of light and chemicals — they have the ability to evoke emotions in us.
All the images at the exhibition are either photographs processed using antiquated dark-room techniques or mixed-media artworks in which these photographs are used to tell a contemporary story.
“The effort is to slow things down, bring the attention back to the process, at the heart of which is analogue. And then invite digital technology into the discussion,” says Allana who has one of the richest collections of archival photographs in India.
Dias is a well-known name in the field of alternate photography. He has been experimenting — with startling results — with historical photographic processes. He is something of an evangelist for 19th century photo processes and fosters these practices amongst his tribe. In Dias’ playful black-and-white works for the exhibition, he is himself the subject of the photographs — he has a walk-in camera obscura and darkroom that allow him to do this. The images are staged and manipulated to seem faintly biblical. Dias even includes photographs where the obsolete process he uses went awry. “His is a pedagogical, almost educational look at technique,” says Allana.
Kuruganti’s photographs are a world apart from Dias’ experimentation. The photographer who lived and worked in New York in the ’90s has picked works that show life on the streets of the megapolis, especially scenes of protest. All of them were manually produced in a darkroom. There are also photos that are intensely personal in nature, many with references to gay rights. “It was not a clinical task, picking these images. They are documents of a time and of how I grew into a photographer,” says Kuruganti, currently photo editor at The Caravan .
So is there any place for dark room technology in our world beyond the fascinating creative possibilities it offers? “It is certainly not affordable anymore, though film still makes for a far more amazing medium than digital if you have the money. Its tonality, richness and possibilities are absolutely unique,” says Kuruganti.
Those boxfuls of small black-and-white photographs of ancestors stowed away in our almirahs make for a great anthropological study of their times. They can also be located in a larger piece of art to enhance their emotional appeal. That is precisely what artist, animation filmmaker and designer Sukanya Ghosh has done with her own personal photographic collection.
Her works are framed as collages as well as composite boxes with photographs and accompanying memorabilia. So, you are not just looking at the great grand aunt staring straight at the camera but also the small things that surround the memory of her for the artiste. The exhibition comes a full historical circle with Mohsin’s works where she presents archival photos as Instagram shots with hashtags, ‘likes’ and comments.
ON VIEW: The Surface of Things :
Photography in Process, Alliance Francaise Delhi, on till Dec. 13.
Malini Nair likes to explore
the intersection between culture and society in her writings.
