drishti - of perception and its managment

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 19^th 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.