This is an article i wrote for the India Habitat Centre's Visual Arts Journal. in 2006. It was a part of a seminar at the Habitat Center on Drishti.
seems to be quite relevant today.
Drishti: Experiencing
knowledge visually
Perception and Photography : Of perception and its management
Maya
is the illusion of mistaking our relative perceptive for reality – of confusing
the
map with the territory.
Fritjof Capra: The Tao of
Physics.
The Camera creates our Drishti.
It is the drishti
of the camera that, today, dominates our perceptions of reality.
Photography, in its different avtars – as cinema and television, in
print and as the virtual feeds of the Worldwide Web - has become our main form
of perception - of the world and of our selves.
I see photography as a Mapping and a new and powerful,
very male, Mahamaya. The camera, for me, is a maya machine. A machine
that creates a hyper reality where images are more powerful than ‘reality’ they
represent.
It is this idea of photography as Mahamaya that I want to
explore. Look at the illusion of photography’s realist discourse of 'photographic truth' and its ability to
control us by creating for us, our very sense of ‘Self '.
Maya has been seen
and talked about as the mysterious power by which God controls the universe.
Maya though, is not just ‘illusion’ or ‘a veil that obscures reality’. Maya
also means ‘delusion’. Before Maya, the word Avidya was used as
its equivalent in the Upanishads. Being rooted in the phenomenal, spectacular
world of a contemporary society that is seen and shown as media generated
spectacles, is rooting oneself in avidya,
especially if the look, the gaze, the larger ‘picture’ surrounding us, and the
pictures inside our heads, are the products of the singular, monocular vision
of the camera.
Cameras today construct our world as a vast visual
landscape – an ‘Information Landscape’ that is super saturated with
photographic images - photographs that bypass barriers of language and culture,
both spoken and visual, as no other images can, or did. Images then crystallize
to construct our social and political realities to make our world a world that
is constructed by the camera, and controlled by it.
Photography's invention in the middle of the 19th
century decisively shifted culture from Shruti to Drishti and the
Biblical Word–that-first-was to ‘Image’. Photography completed the process of
privileging the eyes over all our other senses. A process that the discovery of
linear perceptive and the invention of Guttenberg's movable type printing press
had begun when they 'visualized' the world and the word (making the latter
something that was more to be visually read than aurally heard).
Drishti or perception is thought to be incomplete,
immediate knowledge. It is the buddhi, the intellect and the man
(mind), that are said to be the major means of perception and are the mediators
of perception to the Self. When drishti
is aided by the mind and the ego it is supposed to reflect the consciousness of
a purush like a mirror reflecting an image.
Photography has been called a mirror. It is both ‘a mirror with a memory’ - freezing what it
reflects and a mirror reflecting the subjectivity of the photographer.
I speak, subjectively, as (I hope) a conscious purush, and
as a documentary photographer who now sees the camera as a creator of fiction -
the fiction that creates the fantasies, which dominate our objective and
subjective perceptions of the world. I
don’t see photography as a Window giving us an objective look at the reality
out there. Or even as a Mirror, reflecting only my navel gazing subjectivity.
I no longer believe
there is such a thing as a pure documentary photography. That photographs are
purveyors of Truth. The act of picture
making I know, is never neutral .Was never neutral - not even in any ‘I am a
camera’ or ‘fly on the wall’ approach.
It was certainly not neutral in the colonial documentation
of the world. A documentation that was about the creating of the lesser ‘Other’
and about making and justifying the power of the West over the to-be-ruled-over
Rest.
This was a ‘documentation’ that we internalized as
colonial subjects and continue to subscribe to even today. As a character in
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses put it, “they describe us, that’s all.
They have the power of description. And we succumb to the pictures they
construct.”
Most self-perceptions are all too dependent on the
perceptions of others. How others see
you, know and show you and how you see others and want to be seen by them.
I am – to me and to
the world - a Hindu. But that word
exists only because of a mistake - an absence, actually. The absence of an ‘S’,
in Old Persian. Persian that replaced
the ‘S’ with an ‘H’ and made the people around and beyond the
Sindhu River, ‘Hindus’ forever. And the word had nothing to do with any
religious identity.
Colonial documentations were not mistakes, though. As
texts, studies and photographic surveys they were consciously used to define
distinctiveness and exaggerate differences.
They were used to create the lesser ‘other’ that we internalized to make
our own identities. Our ‘selves’- as
lesser ‘others’.
Lord Curzon saw colonial studies as ‘a great imperial obligation’. “Our capacity to understand what may be
called the genius of the East,” he told the House of Commons in 1909, “is the
sole basis upon which we are likely to be able to maintain, in future, the
position we have won.”
I succumbed to that colonial idea of ‘documentary’ photography,
too. I believed in its social purpose and ignored its highly political and
problematic past - its hidden histories, texts and subtexts. I now know that photographs are influenced by
simple things. Like how tall we are or the way we stand. How far we bend or
refuse to bend. They are influenced by
our ethnicity and colour. By our religion and our caste. Our gender. Our fears and prejudices. Our likes and
dislikes. Our loves and hates.
Photographs are most certainly influenced by political convictions and
commercial interests.
I see photographic representation as a cartographic
controlling of the world, a highly politicized 'mapping'. A mapping that had its roots in colonialism
but continues to grow exponentially in these ‘New World Order’ days of a new
‘empire’ that seeks not lands but the world's resources and a control over its’
cultural and social life as the ‘soft power’ hegemony that will enable it to
keep control of the 21st century – “a new American century, in which we will
become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful”.
“ The de facto role of the US Armed Forces will be
to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.”
These are quotes from Parameters, the US Army
War College Quarterly (Summer, 1997).
Our cultural perceptions and we are to be constructed,
militarily if necessary, to serve American interests.
What is sought is a “full spectrum domination” that “will
not allow any challenges - economic, military or cultural“ - a domination that
seeks to control all international commons – ‘including space and cyberspace.
Culture not excluded”.
The fourth generation warfare of the long War on Terrorism
is not a conventional battle between nations and their armies. It is as an
unending war that the American Marines Journal tells you, "sees the
whole of an enemy’s society as a battlefield – where action will occur
concurrently throughout all participants’ depth including their society as a
cultural and not just as a physical entity”.
McDonald and McDonnell - Burgers and B-12 bombers.
They are inseparable parts of our new McWorld-the corporate controlled consumer
culture that is being created around the world.
Drishti, then, has to be seen in relationship to
the creation and control of knowledge as power. It has to be seen in the
context of our new world’s increasingly globalised, cultural and political
power relationships. Power relationships, which have made Seeing and Perception
a matter of controlling knowledge and seeking power.
The existential reality of suffering, dukha, was
seen, in India, as the starting point for the search for a knowledge that was
about seeking solutions to suffering. A knowledge that was about seeking salves
and salvation.
Today, though, knowledge is seen a search for an abstract idea of truth and
as ‘Information Warfare’.
Knowledge has become the site of a battle between information masters and
information victims.
Knowledge is now the purview of international,
information-based industries that know no national or cultural borders. And
these ‘information industries’ rely on increasing control over perception
through strategies blatantly described as Perception Management. Strategies
designed to give us information but control knowledge. Give us ‘Maximum images
and minimum insight’. Strategies that openly talk of government departments for
deception, misinformation, disinformation, media manipulation, spin doctoring
and information warfare. Strategies that are designed by media management
companies run by self-styled ‘information warriors’ intent on laying a fog of
information war, a leela like deceptive veil, on our world. A mass media
mediated Mahamaya that is sold as ‘reality’ through controlled, camera
generated images.
Photography is a way of seeing and a way of controlling
what others see. It is a technological and mechanized form of perception and an
act of re-presentation. Photography is a
representational and perceptual practice that began in ancient city-states as a
cartographic surveying of lands and today visually grids the world into small
visual rectangles. Photographs that amplify vision through contemporary
communication technologies, and concretize perception into a succession of
split second visuals. Visuals that seem to say so little in real terms yet
control so much of our minds when they are carried across the world at
incredible, instantaneous speeds.
Photographs are thevirtual visual bricks that construct
our social and political landscape. They construct our perceptions, our culture
and us more effectively than bricks ever could. Or did. Especially in these
days when there are many times more photographs in the world than there are
bricks – with many more being added in the last few years of digital
photography than were shot in the whole history of film based photography.
ENLIGHTENMENT
‘Photo Graphy’ is Latin for’ writing with light’.
Photography is a process of 'drawing with light'. It is an act of
‘enlightenment’ in a camera obscura - a dark room. And it is
closely connected to the European idea of Enlightenment. ‘Enlightenment’, which
was seen to be bringing Light into the dark corners of the world - as the great
European Civilizing Mission. A mission that used photography less as an
‘enlightening’ than as an enslaving tool.
The concept of a godlike Enlightenment was seen and sold
as the product of a progressive, Western Mind. An enlightenment that promised
to give the world Modernity and Progress in the form of Reason, an objective
and superior science, universal human rights, democracy, morality and a superior
humanistic law. What we also got was an autonomous ‘Art’ cut off from its
religious roots and cultural connections. Art as a matter of better taste and
superior style - a purer and higher ‘art for art’s sake’ Art. An art that was
secular and politically safer because it was decontextualised and culturally
disconnected from the surrounding society.
If what was promised was Progress with superior ‘human’
laws and democracy (actually a liberal
form of imperialism) what we were given was a colonialism that used the idea of
‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ to obtain, from us, the colonized, our consent to be
ruled. We were seen and defined as the lesser ‘other’ in need of, and asking
for civilization, democracy and a modernism that successfully hollowed out our
cultures even as it haloed its own forms
Photography, invented in the heydays (hay days, actually)
of colonialism, was a major player in this Colonial Project. A project which
used the credibility and veracity of the photographic image -its realism - to
create and sell the idea of the white mans' civilize-the-world burden.
Realism was a
weapon for the colonial powers. They used it to produce their version of the
reality of the lesser Other. An ‘other’ they constructed and fabricated to
substantiate the superior 'self' they created for themselves.
The realms of the
Rest were seen, shown and proved, through photography, to be an anonymous
world, not populated by individuals, or sometimes, even by humans -an
underdeveloped world that could not represent itself and had to be represented
and ruled. Civilized and saved.
Photography could
even dismiss the presence of older cultures and civilizations by photographing
their ruins and pointing to them as the signs of cultural decline - a decaying,
downward progress that reflected a moral and political decline. Landscapes,
photographed without people, showed the reality of 'empty lands' asking to be filled and
available for the taking.
The realist discourse of photography believes that
photographs capture the world as it is - as scientific, empirical knowledge.
The camera’s mechanical nature is supposed to give us the unchallenged,
unassailable ‘reality’ of photography as a mechanized form of perception. Photography is seen as a mechanical
reproduction that forms an image without the intervention of human creativity
and presents us with a world ‘drawn by
its own pencil’ - The Pencil of Nature. A pencil that could not, we are told,
have personal biases and political agendas.
The camera then, is thought to reveal not just the essence
- the rasa of the objects it depicts but the reality of what it shoots,
snaps 'captures' and shows.
Reality and image, though, are separate
and only combined by the mind. The Vedas tell us that it is the mind,
which, through interpretation and analysis, moves indeterminate perception - a
surface glance - into determinate knowledge. And it is minds that photographic
images were and are used to manipulate and control.
It is the light bouncing off a surface that makes a
photograph. Photographs, inherently, are indeterminate knowledge. They are
descriptions/ inscriptions of surfaces but have deep powers of delusion. They
are a meta-text that creates a mono-visual world by displacing other senses,
other visions and other voices other histories.
They are Avidya. Maya.
The collapse of the Berlin wall marked, as Francis
Fukoyama put it, ‘The End of History’.
The collapse meant the end of any multiple truths, multiple histories, multiple
economies and pluralistic points of view and marked the beginning of a Super
Power point of view of the world. One
Super Power - One World Image - the official American one.
This Super Power point of view of the world
has brought us into an age founded on the fabrication and promotion of pseudo
realities. Manufactured, mediated realities that are carefully constructed and
mediated by militarily controlled 'Psy Ops' and not merely mirrored by the
‘mirror with a memory’ as a raw ‘revealed reality’, Psychological Operations
that use and control photography as a potent weapon in war and in the creation
of a consumer society.
Photography, these
days, is formed and informed by the manipulative methods of those in power.
Governments and media corporations, today, are run by professional perception
managers and spin doctors like the American Republican pollster Frank Luntz,
who realize the immense potency and propaganda value of photography. “Americans
like a good picture,” he said before the beginning of the Gulf war, “and one
photograph of an Iraqi child kissing an American soldier is more powerful than
two months of debate on the floor of Congress.”
Photography, around the world, is considered to be an
American art form. And the American influence on the world’s photographic
practices and its media spaces is very visible and very hard to deny. The
America we know is mediated in our minds by the camera. The US is as much a nation made by its
Hollywood movies and TV industry, as it is a nation that uses these powerful
visual media to control perceptions of itself around the world. Its ‘reel
world’ becomes our real world.
Its all too powerful media have shown the world the
incredible power of pictures. From a
society that saw photography as a tool for social change, a la Jacob Riis and
Lewis Hine, the US has become a nation that uses photography as a system of
control that can construct soft power, cultural hegemonies.
Especially after 9/11.
Sept 11, 2001 was
used for the creation of a carefully controlled and constructed visual history
that filled the world with unforgettable images. Camera generated and
constantly repeated on the worlds’ TV screen those images manufactured a hard
to deny ‘history’. In the worlds' individual and collective minds, these images
are now iconic and they have successfully sold us a simplistic worldview of
Good against Evil. The ‘reality’ of THEM Evil Terrorists and US Good Cowboys.
The idea of Reality and Realism is the key to not just credible political
propaganda. Advertising too relies on the illusionist ‘reality’ of the camera image to seduce, sell
and create a Consumer culture that is seen as the road to the modern
world - a liberation. We define ourselves through consumption and find our
identity in the seductive surfaces of images and in the conspicuous consumption
they promote. Our lives are lived as
Lifestyles. Lifestyles that are about images implanted in our imagination.
Images one is consuming as images. Images that, then, consume us.
Images internalized as
imagination are a powerful and insidious tool of persuasion. And it is these
media made pictures in our heads that control our understanding of reality and
ourselves. Once internalized, they are used to mediate
our social relationships and manufacture the alienation, the dislocated,
fragmented ‘self' that is inherently insecure, and thus easier to sell
to. The insecure ‘I’ that is
created sees shopping as ‘retail therapy’ and buys a sense of belonging and the
status those big brands are supposed to bestow.
Advertising is probably the
biggest and most influential user of photography. It uses the camera to create
consumer cultures of fleeting fashions, of unlimited needs and insatiable
desires - a commercial landscape of very non-Gandhian greeds.
The camera has recreated the
cosmopolitan city as a center of conspicuous
consumption. Cities have become a ‘fantasyscape’ of globalised
advertising images. Images, which construct our public spaces, our minds and us
by creating a totalitarian image world, and undermine cultural diversity.
The walls of our new Malls seem to be built by
international Brands. The buildings appear to be branded - by brands, for
brands, speaking the language of global branding. Their surfaces are a
seductive skin show - a cool world of hot imagery. Hot, branded bodies are made
visible by the camera and used to construct a celebrity culture that is about
the Body. The Body Beautiful. The Body
imagined as it is imaged by the advertising and the fashion industry.
Body consciousness is the new reality of the self that the
camera successfully creates as it promotes a shallow photogenic attractiveness
and sells the idea of the Self as Body. A body to dress and pamper. The ‘body beautiful’ you can only aspire to,
but never really be.
Image
consciousness becomes the new form of a self-knowledge constructed by a self
that is simply a spectator - a consumer of images, unable to see beyond the
surface that photography presents. The celebrity spectacle that the camera
creates has become the source of the self.
Perception is controlled by appearances and life becomes an
exhibitionistic display to be lived as a lifestyle. Life is about the ‘I’ as
image. An ‘I’ living in a world where
images become more powerful than reality in the construction of identity and
the self that is supposed to be the mind that sees and perceives. The buddhi behind the eyes that
defines Drishti.
There is no thinking 'Self' left - only an appearance that
is without any substance or depth.
Cultures are constructed and controlled by commercial
interests as cultures of distraction. Images are used to captivate us by
distracting us from the reality of our lives and they succeed in replacing
any inherent resistance with a compliant and carefully cultivated complacency
We want to be individuals. Find our
selves, but we don’t question the role of the image in advertising. Advertising that constructs us as a consumers
looking for social standing - seeking
and satisfied by ideas of Status when what is called for is independent
thinking - an exploration of a deeper self.
Camera
as Darshan Devta.
On a deeply personal level, I see photography not just as
politics but also as darshan.
Photography can be a spiritual seeing and a supernormal
beholding. It is definitely a visionary experiencing and a magical, mystical,
perception.
The camera as a Darshan Devta refines not only my
vision, it also helps to focus my other senses. The camera, for me, is a
sensitizing machine and photography is about a perception that is a deeper,
more intuitive, knowledge. Knowledge
that is about wisdom that is not a limited, personal wisdom but wisdom that
seems to belong to an unseen universe. I
seek, through photography, a higher, extraordinary knowledge and an
almost yogic intuition that apprehends reality as it is – in its fullness and
harmony. A darshan that is a seeing brought about through almost psychic
means - by the transcending of limiting mind processes and by the perception of
a subtler seeing of life.
Like a yogi I want to transcend sense stimulated, ordinary
perception for the extraordinary subtleties of prakriti. I seek a satvic
knowledge - hoping to become one with the camera and object.
You may wonder how photographer can to do that or even connect the camera
with all these rather esoteric ideas from the past.
I did too. Until I
read about Zen and its roots in dhyan. And realized, in practice, that
photography is a medium particularly suited to such an exploration of
perception. Cartier Bresson connected photography to Zen and the Art of Archery
and practiced it as a form of Zen - as a process of going beyond conscious
thinking and control.
By consciously
controlling every element in a picture, carefully arranging what is before the
camera and by composing what is in the frame, one can make great illustrations
for the advertising world or even pictorially perfect pictures that follow all
the rules about horizons on thirds etc but are limited in their outlook and
lack a certain 'magic'. The magic of a moment that seems to make itself and
reveal a world that is beyond the seeing of a conscious, controlled mind.
I believe in a perception that seeks not just a 'scene'
but a synchronicity with the unseen -
where the image becomes a kind of yantra. A yantra that harnesses
both the eye and the mind into a moment that is about seeing behind the usually
unseen.
To photograph is, for me, to partake of Paravidya,
a higher intuitive knowledge, a wisdom beyond commonsense and simple sensing. I
seek a Seeing that is not pre-seeing, A photography that is not
patronizing, or paternalistic and does not pre-empt others rights and fights to
perceive and protect, record and recall, forget or foster, explore and exploit
their own past and present. As they find fit.
I seek a drishti that is a democratic way of
seeing and showing. A drishti that is not enforcing a globalised, visual
monoculture. A drishti that is
not managed perception. Or Perception
Management.
About the Author
Satish Sharma is an independent photographer, a sometimes
curator and a researcher/ writer on Photography in India. He is interested in,
and is exploring, its cultural politics, its social spaces and its subaltern
history.
