text panel for my exhibition

Text panel for my exhibition.

TEXTS AND THE CITY

The creation of the first Cities and the invention of Writing lie at the roots of our very idea of Civilization. They began together and neither now exists without the other. Especially in our modern, market driven, metropolises. Metropolises that, this year, will be home to a record breaking number of citywallahs . Citywallahs who will out number their country cousins, for the first time in human history.

And for us history making citywallahs there is no getting away from the torrents of Texts that are the drivers of our urban, market driven and increasingly destructive duniya. Texts that are targeting us with a continuous volley of visual information. Information that is encapsulated by, or packaged around, the most powerful visual language ever invented. Photography ! Or rather, to be more specific, Photography as “Eye Candy” flowing ( in different photographic avtars) from the black barrels of lenses. Barrels that are more powerful than barrels of Mao’s guns.

It is these Eyeball grabbing photographic texts and their relationships with the construction and control of our selves and our consumer oriented cities that interests me. Pics are, after all, the rectangular visual bricks that actually construct our social and political landscape.

The image saturated cityscape we now live in cultivates a world view that has a clear hegemonic agenda. It is an image saturated mediascape that mediates and manufactures political, cultural and commercial, power. Its texts are loaded with subtexts. Sub texts that reinforce a dominant way of seeing. A way of seeing that increasingly negates other ways of looking. The iconic Decisive Moment (a la Henri Cartier Bresson) in photography, for example, has become a canonical metatext that precludes other ways of photographically seeing and shooting the street. And “seeing,” another Henri (Mattise, this time) reminds us,” is already a creative process. One that demands an effort”.

An effort that we have to make - to see and to unsee the seeing thrust down our eyeballs. See the spectacle for what it is. Images with messages creating a cultural landscape of desires and promoting a consuming culture of Greed. Greed over Need. Greed that our planet can no longer afford.

As Mahatama Gandhi said, “there is enough in the world for everyone’s needs. Not for everyone’s greeds”.

That is a lesson our cities have to learn. Fast. We have to learn to be questioning citizens and not be just image driven Consumers.

SATISH SHARMA