photography archives and neo colonialism

This is an article published  in today's THE WEEK . cant find a link to it so I am putting my own text online.  Its long  and not very reader friendly but i hope it will find readers who will read it to the end

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                                                                    TAKE 2
                                                          Postcards & Beyond :
                The Socio-political constructs of photography

There are many things that Photography has been called. Two definitions come to my mind as I think about the idea of Photo Archives. Photography as 'The Mirror with a Memory' and Photography as an all pervasive ' Museum without Walls'

The first definition promised a democratic, a more scientific and objective, mirror like, reflection of the world and its people. The second delivered a dangerous documentation and power preservation mode in a space that was a window through which the powerful West viewed, mapped and created the Rest.  A window that we, the 21st century,  supposedly post colonial, Rest, continue to peer through as we look at ourselves as reflections mirrored in the  world's Museums and in Photography's own 'Museum without Walls' .

We see and hardly question the reflections that certain, out dated uses of photography created. We do this despite an increasing understanding that Museums are a system of  control. They are spaces that are used to perpetuate elite power by institutionalizing a rather one sided Representation. Re-presentation that has, justifiably, come under serious questioning in our post modern and post colonial worlds. 

The questioning, though, sadly remains cloistered in academic circles. It has yet to filter down to the button pressing users of the most powerful representational language the world has ever known. Photography !  Photography in its different, increasingly more widespread and powerful, multi headed and multi armed, avatars. As Film, Television and the Web these photography avtars weave a worldview that works, primarily, for the World's  elite.

Photography's  avtars create countless images. Images produced by the black barrels of lenses . Barrels that may not be made of gunmetal but have a far greater, quieter and subtler power. A power that guns, actually, never had.  It is images, after all, that drive the world's consumption driven economies  even as they construct our societies and our identities as consumers.   

Both, the photographic mirror and the photographic window, were (and still are) framed within the politics of 19th Century colonialism.  A colonialism that never really ended and, in fact, continues to exist as, a far more dangerous, neocolonialism.  A neo colonialism that doesn’t occupy lands but seeks to occupy, and control, Minds.

Photography and Colonialism were, we have to remember, inseparable partners in the colonial project. And, today, photography continues to play its part in the creation of what is called, 'soft power hegemonies'.

Photographs construct a worldview that suits a society's ruling elite. They work by naturalizing particular and partial Perceptions as Reality. They work by memorializing what is in them and by monumentalising  that in our minds as Reality and  as "our Heritage".  Heritage that is then deemed worthy of Conservation  and Preservation for the future.  The un photographed becomes the unseen. Something that is, then, easier to ignore, to forget and even to destroy.

"Fom the earlierst days of the calotype, the curious tripod, with its mysterious chamber and mouth of brass, taught the natives of this country that their conquerors were inventors of other instruments besides the formidable guns of their artillery, which, though, as suspicious perhaps in appearance, attained their object with less noise and smoke.  -  Samuel Bourne

Bourne was a 19th century British photographer who worked in India and set up the famous - "Bourne and Sheppard" studio in Calcutta. It was a studio that more than just photographed the Royalty from all over British India -Nepal included. It created a very Orientalist image bank of the exotic other - one that echoed and was found in the countless' Cabinets of Curiosities' that were regular drawing room furniture in 19th century Western homes. These Cabinets served as photographically illustrated encyclopedias of colonized worlds and Peoples. Those wooden cabinets, filled with anthropologically ordered photographs, popularised and reinforced  ideas of  poor and rich savages out there who needed to be civilized  and looked after.

Rudyard Kipling's writings alone would not have been able to sell the idea of "the White Man's Burden.   Without the photographic, supposedly objective, proof, all the scientific studies by all those 19th century anthropologists and ethnographers could not have sold  the social Darwinism that drove the colonial game of civilizing and controlling   the Rest of the world.  

Axel  Plathe, the UNESCO Representative to Nepal  and the chief guest at the opening of the exhibition  talked about  “Mukunda Bahadur Shrestha’s photographs bringing knowledge about Nepal and the living culture of its people to audiences  across linguistic, geographical and cultural boundaries of reality and  beyond personal storytelling". They were he said "now part of Nepal’s audiovisual legacy. And as such, he continued, "they form part of the universal documentary heritage, of the Memory of the World.”

"The universal documentary heritage' that creates "the Memory of the World" is highly suspect these days. Documentary photography has a long history of being a partner in the creation of a 'soft' hegemonic power over the poor and, somehow lesser, beings of the world. The idea of a singular Memory of the World created by a singular documentary heritage is not just suspect, it is a downright dangerous idea whose time has long gone. Though, surprisingly enough, Documentary photography courses and workshops continue to be taught to young photographers -  and that too by western white documentary photographers who are still "Othering" and Orientialising the rest of us.   But then, that language of 'documenting' others is one that the West still uses when it talks of a singular History of the world. A history that is linear and can come to an end once capitalism succeeds in becoming the only economic model of the world - a la  Francis Fukuyama. What is promoted by that sense of linear History is an economic model that the 'advanced, first world, west' refuses to let go of, one that it is fighting wars to enforce - at missile point. One in which photography is still a major player. 

The West's power to control representation has to be challenged and reclaimed.   Reclaimed  and remade - as many  Memories. . As Histories and as Herstories. Hundreds, thousands and millions, or even billions, of them. Stories and memories not written in a linear flow that is about progress from Primitive to progressive Modern. Stories not told within set power structures and set story telling systems.

We need to create counter archives. Archives that are not exclusive and excluding.  Ones that are a lot more contextualised and  questioning of hierarchy of History.

We can do that easily now. Today's technologies and increasingly cheaper, more democratic digital distribution networks are making the once impossible to think of, very possible. The Local can now go Global. The localization of the Global is now, not the only way 'forward'. Globalisation can be a double edged sword - in our hands, for a change, and in the hands of  the children of lesser gods in the hinterlands of Nations..

 "Personal story telling" that one is supposed to move beyond' is actually the future of reclaimed History. As Histories. The ease of telling and broadcasting stories across the increasingly  connected digital  duniya  can create real democracies. But only if one is aware of the political necessity to do so. To paraphrase Trinh Minh-Ha, we need to tell our stories in our ways before they are told by someone else, for us, in their ways. And that is a right that one has to extend to all sections of society by enabling multiple voices. Giving them an equal space in the creation of more than just "National" Identities.

Axel Plathe talked about how "preserving and making this photographic heritage accessible will help understand Nepal’s people, their history and culture. Its preservation is important to Nepal, where cultural diversity and shared heritage are so vital for nurturing the sense of one nation".

The one nation, with one people speaking one single language that Prithvi Narain Shah's raised finger signifies was a top down, pre democracy model. One that, eventually, did not work. It was a model that is being challenged at this very moment as a Naya Nepal seeks to create a fairer Federal state. A state where all peoples have a  right to self representation. Not just on the political stage, either. Shared cultures and cultural respect  for other cultures are what brings people together and keeps them together. Singular ideas of nationhood will not work for too much longer as peoples' wars extend beyond the political space to the cultural arena.

And this brings me to questions that I just have to ask, even at the risk of being called an 'interfering Indian'.

Why, one wonders, was Nepal Picture Library's first exhibition in an Art Gallery curated by a Western anthropologist  ?

 The partnership of Anthropology and Photography, after all, has a very troubling history.  A colonial history where Photography was used by anthropologists, working within the colonial system, to study and help subordinate societies all around the world. And although their part in the creation of Western power has been critically examined and condemned by even their own colleagues, Anthroplogists and Ethnographers are again a part of Western armies. They serve western occupying powers -in uniform -as "Human Terrain Teams". The human sciences are being weaponised  through these Teams. Teams that are helping to advance neo colonial agendas. All over again!  I am very troubled by the continued anthropological 'research; into 'Other' cultures and by the way it promotes neo colonialism. More troubled, actually, by the desire for white foreign experts in a country that boasts of never being colonised.  But  then this is a country  where people  still  aspire for and  accept  "Orders of the British Empire".

There is one last point I will make- again at the risk of potentially rubbing furs the wrong way.

 Should photography be reduced to an Art if it is shown publicly?   And why should it be considered a more serious art form only when, and if, it is printed on archival  paper with archival inks, etc? These are factors that may work to increase Photography's commercial value as a collectible art form. But they do little to add value to Photography itself.  Photography is, as Man Ray, (the famous American photographer and artist) said. "more than Art"  It is more than just an art, I would add.  And reducing it to an Art is probably the most dangerous thing that could happen to Photography.  The white gallery walls would sanitise and sterilise it beyond recognition.   Photography would become a very unhappy and sorry practice. Mastrubatory and Modern but  without a critical social purpose.  

"Society is concerned to tame the photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. To do this it possesses two means.  The first consists of making Photography into an Art, for no art is mad."

"The other means of taming the Photograph is to generalize, to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness "  - Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.

The camera that enlightens, makes lucid.  That is photography for me. Not camera obscura -photography that obscures reality in the name of being an Art form.   Photography's purpose, I believe, is to shine a light into the dark corners of the world.  Empower them. For that, it sometimes needs the support of critical texts. This is one of them.

SATISH SHARMA .