the whiteness of photography history.

I see in this article and the exhibition it reports on, a different issue. Beyond the binary of photography in Colour  or Black and white. what strikes me is the 'whiteness' of the exhibition  - the exclusion of any 'coloured' photographer from a part of the world that has no colourphobia, actually loves colour and has a different cultural history of its use . Raghubir Singh comes to mind. 

Here is something he wrote in The Economic Times of 12th Feb , 1995. The line about the white frame lines in Leicas makes me  think about how whiteness of Photography Masters still frames the History Photography, even the 21st century. The white bias that I had noticed decades ago  and which had made me work on recovering  'other versions of photography history lives on. 

"The Leicas I used at one time had white frame lines, quite like the lines on a tennis court. While the tennis player faces a single ball, the photographer in the streets has many balls coming at him from different directions.For a colour photographer like myself, these balls bear all the colours of Indian life. In the act of trapping them, controlling them and transforming them through the camera and film, the photographer makes art out of life."

Raghubir Singh  was deeply influenced by Bresson and knew him well. He writes about  discovering Cartier Bresson 's Beautiful Jaipur  when he first began photography and he had actually lived and worked in Paris  where, as he puts it, "the street photographers art had developed" .  Well known for a series of books he published it was as a photographer immersed in the Indian 'river of colour'  that he made his mark.  Not a deep enough mark to matter it would seem. He is not part of this show. One wonders if he was even considered. 

The colour loving parts  of the world are represented ( orientalised would be a better word), as usual,  by  white photographers.

Henri Cartier-Bresson once said: "Photography in colour? It is something indigestible, the negation of all photography's three-dimensional values." This rejection of colour was based on snobbery (colour was the medium of commerce and advertising) and common sense – during most of his lifetime, colour photography was still a fledgling, rudimentary medium. How intriguing, then, to see a small, carefully chosen selection of his lesser-known work pitted against some of the great colour photographers of recent times, all of whom adhere in varying degrees to Cartier-Bresson's ethos of the "decisive moment".

The curator of Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, which opens this week at Somerset House in London, spelled out the rationale behind the show. "My proposition is simple: take the ethos of the decisive moment, and look at how colour photographers have actually fared. Put differently, if we take Cartier-Bresson's scepticism about colour photography as a challenge, how convincing is the response?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/nov/07/henri-cartier-bresson-photography?intcmp=ILCMUSIMG9382