Everyday Tales

It is believed that there are more photographs than bricks in the world today. A good enough reason, one might think, to construct the natio...

It is believed that there are more photographs than bricks in the world today. A good enough reason, one might think, to construct the nation through images.

Photography has had a long and contentious presence in India, since the middle of the nineteenth century. Then it was used as a tool for documenting the progressive colonial presence and the primitive, exotic or erotic colonised. Now, it8217;s everyone8217;s tool to document their lives, their aspirations, other8217;s lives, other8217;s histories.

Typically, most of the middle class is brought up to believe that photography is really the stuff of taut compositions, brilliant technical finesse and the 8216;moment8217;.

Photography as a hobby must also emulate these attributes. Is this what there is to 155 years of photography in 57-year-old independent India? The hundreds of photographers8212;in your home and mine, in the all occasion special arrangement for marriages and parties studios and modest melas8212;remain marginal to this discourse. Yet they offer us an ingenious understanding of photography today. What does each offer?

A recent exhibition, Middle Aged Spread, offered some clues. Curated by art writer Gayatri Sinha and presented by Delhi8217;s Anant Art Gallery, the show examined India in its 58th year through the images of 11 photographers. Sinha included a range of photographers, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Sheba Chhachhi.

Let me first specially mention the iconic Cartier-Bresson. The photographs in this exhibition were the stuff that has come to symbolise the events they captured. Many of them appear to have become memorised, recurring in our consciousness. Recall the images of refugees from the Partition sitting up on trees, or the scenes of mass grief after Gandhi8217;s death. But Cartier-Bresson went beyond that, as the show reminded us, photographing the common man. He created a lush landscape like no other.

Part of India8217;s middle age spread has been the accessibility of photography and the awareness and understanding many people have about how they would like to be represented. This aspect found fulfilment in the works of Ram Rehman, Chhachhi and Dayanita Singh.

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While Chhachhi8217;s work was part of a larger process of dialogue with women and their narratives, she enables her subjects to tell their rather heroic tales set in everyday India. Singh photographs primarily people she seems to know, the urban elite, who also determine how they will be imaged. Her exhibited work , the Samara series, is named after the young woman she has been photographing since she could only just walk. In a flash, a generation of the young and wrinkle-free come forth to claim their share in this sagging, middle-aged state. Rehman, too, explores the competing understandings of the sacred and the revered. Of the three, he gestures grandly to the street and to the unknown photographers who are amongst the most prolific of all in India.

What binds the trio is that they have moved away from the enthralling, adrenaline-pumping 8216;moment8217; style to one where the image is part of a larger narrative.

But we still miss those who click to help others construct their own stories, or even to record their own.

The man with dreamscape backdrops and delightful digital tricks has more bricks to build and play with than anyone else. In the hundreds of studios and colour labs across India, the real middle aged spread emerges.