from the economic times. jan 19992 - by sadanand menon

THE PEELING FACE OF POLITICS ON THE WALL

The unbiquitous face on the wall is amongst the most compelling street graffiti in India. Walls , road signs, bus-stops, railing, bunks, lamp-posts – any surface is converted into a canvas for sticking on the hundreds of thousands of pasty, multicoloured litho offset posters of mutton-headed politicians glorified into iconic deities. The condensation of a person’s entire politics into a series of tilt-up-mug-shots. It has, over the years, become the elliptical language through which the powerful conduct their one way communication with the powerless.

The doctored and glamorized image of ‘the leader’ succeeds in insidiously aggressing its way into the innermost recesses of a nation’s consciousness. It is a feat made possible by the manipulative process of photography which can invest the most mundane and pedestrian of visages with a lambency and beatitude that can provoke instant veneration.

In a society in which an entire population is in search of an identity those who can boast of’ possessing a face’ – like politicians, filmstars, TV newsreaders – are the ones who also’ possess’ the powers of self constitution. Iconism succeeds as it provides the deprived of a vicarious ad illusory avenue for self-actualisation. It is a first step in the creation of a landscape littered with ‘little men’.

Ironically, it is a cognitive knot that cannot be untied through the use of prosaic, verbal instruments. The only counter and antidote to manipulative photography is the visual weaponry of surrealist photography that can take those very images byt the scruff of the neck and wring them to a point that they become their own parodies and spew out their essential content. Also point out that ludicrousness and , sometime, the appositeness of certain juxtapositions of image and context in public. Luckily, in the New Delhi- based  Satish Sharma, the Indian shutterbug community has at least one such deep interlocutor of the form. For all one knows, the might be its only one.

For a decade now, the Nilgiris born Satish Sharma has been padding the streets stalking the ephemeral truths and hidden meanings behind those ‘faces on the wall’ . some of his stories are not too different from the chilling thought ironic original narrative of H.G Wells. He claims that the tendentious message in most of his shots of posters, by strange ’magical coincidence’ were premonitions of the events to follow. “The Photographer as seer,” he believes ‘can anticipate events before they happen.’

Satish Sharma’s quest, in his range of ‘political pictures’ has been to demystify the politician’s image, which he finds “is constantly glorified and monumentalized through the low angle framing”. However, in times when access to the politician is denied to the journalist the alternative is to seek an entry point, through his carefully planned and constructed image.

Besides, since his journalistic days, when Satish discovered that the ‘meaning’ of his pictures was being totally changed at the desk by the use of captions , he began, consciously looking for situations in which the caption was already contained in the picture and obviated the need for superimposed verbalizing. It was a pedagogic exercise in which the ambiguity of the image was sharpened through alphabetisation.

For Satish, photography is an extension of linguistics and, as such, the photo-frame serves as a ‘quotation’. He is candid when he says, “for me words are very important. Most of my work relies on using the word with the frame.” Without a doubt, Satish Sharma must be rated as India’s most ‘radical’ of photographers- someone who has penetrated to the core of ‘oppositional discourse’ in the photo-frame.

SADANAND MENON

Gallery Page, The Economic Times, January ‘92