politics of representation - front page Republica

COMMENTARY

Politics of representation SATISH SHARMA Native image makers need to understand the dehumanization of forced removal/ relocation, re education/re definition – the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality. Your voice. You know and cannot often say it. You try, and keep on trying, to unsay it. For, if you don’t, ‘They’ will not hesitate to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said. –Trinh Minh-Ha in “Woman Native Other”, Indiana University Press, 1989 The first book of photographs from Nepal that I saw was the coffee-table heavyweight on the Ranas of Nepal. It looked like another book I had seen, decades ago, on Raja Deen Dayal and his “Princely India.” Both books had a lot in common. Both were about exotic Eastern elite. Both were from collections of photographs archived abroad. Both drew from and fed into stereotypes of an exotic East. And both were about a grand, marketable past posited against a decaying and poverty-stricken present. “Princely India” had, in the 1980s, pushed me to collect and create an alternative archive – as an “unsaying” of photography’s colonial construct – that was a questioning and reclaiming of an “other” way of telling of photographic stories. The studio photographs I collected, subjective stories that were anchored in a belief in maya and leela, created an oppositional discourse against the so called realist, objective, truth-saying of the very Western “documentary photography.” They were subaltern stories, stories that challenged the all too Western, top-down, visual representations of my world. That collection of photos from Indian studios challenged the belief that the subaltern majority could not represent themselves and had already been represented by documentary photographers like me. Those photographs expanded my whole vision of photography, caught up as it was in very Western ideas and markets. Every photograph, I realized, was a document. And these photographs actually allowed the subjects the right to represent themselves. Tell their own stories. Live their own little leela – all played out in small studio spaces and homes. All photographs are cultural constructs. They are subjective viewpoints, not objective truths. And in archives, they are not just the raw material for our perception of reality; they are the creators of it. The trillions of photographs (more than 60 billion on Facebook alone) that exist in the world outnumber bricks, and construct us in ways that bricks never did. They construct memories, identities and history. Photography changes perceptions and enables control of the sociopolitical structures of societies. In our postmodern world, the construction of any image of a country or region is seen as nothing but a manifestation of one group exercising power over another. National archives in national museums construct and encode certain notions of nationhood, notions that are rarely inclusive and certainly exclusive. We need to move from static nationalistic archives to open networked digital databases, something that our contemporary digital duniya easily enables. Once we accept that representations are not definitive and final, we can use digital databases as new spaces that will allow a reworking, a recontextualizing and reclaiming of politically controlled pasts. We need oppositional discourses with many viewpoints, viewpoints and interventions that start a public debate about cultural domination and cultural identity, about the right to ink one’s own identity. Tell one’s own tales. Make one’s own memories. These should be multiple memories to leave behind for picture-perfect posterity – something family pictures already do, and something that is already happening in social networking sites on the Web. If we do not take the initiative, we risk having our identities pictured for us, and images imposed on us by international and national archives. These are the archives that dominate the world, and they have to be culturally challenged. This is exactly what the Nepal Picture Library is doing, as it begins its new journey toward a visually more varied and representative Naya Nepal. Satish Sharma is an independent photographer, writer and occasional curator of photography. Retelling Histories is a personal history project that attempts to dig up, contextualize and archive photographs from old family photo albums. It is part of the Nepal Picture Library, recently set up by photo.circle with the objective of exploring issues of memory, identity and history through images. A selection of work from the project is being exhibited from September 16-18 at Manga Hiti in Patan Durbar Square as part of the Kathmandu Literary Jatra. Published on 2011-09-16 15:48:27