Waiting for the picture to develop

Sadanand Menon

Chennai has never shown great affinity for the ‘still’ image, and it is this that the city’s Photo Biennale hopes to change

The Chennai Photo Biennale (CPB) aspires to put this 378-year-old city, with its at least 160 years of desultory engagement with photography, on the photo-artistic map of the world. For the second edition of the CPB, scheduled for September 2018, the high-profile Devika Daulet-Singh has been assigned the curatorial responsibility of what promises to be a landmark event.

The CPB aims high in hoping to initiate and sustain dialogues on socio-political, cultural and economic issues through photography and thereby establish a significant space for public engagement with photo-optical practices, even as it looks to put Chennai on the world map of contemporary art.

Not every city can boast of sustained involvement with photography. On invitation last year to the Fotomuseum in Winterthur, near Zurich, I realised how a thriving archival institution for photography can catapult the small town it is located in to the centre of the globe and trigger a very specific visual literacy and cultural dynamic in the region.

The creation of Magnum photo agency, in 1947, by brilliant lensmen Henri Cartier-Bresson, David ‘Chim’ Seymour and Robert and Cornell Capa, made Paris the lead city for photography. New York too, post-WWII, with iconic periodicals like Life and cutting-edge curatorship at the Museum of Modern Art, emerged as the go-to destination for photographic practices. The launch of the International Centre of Photography only consolidated this. At various times, Tokyo with Hiroshi Hamaya and Eiichiro Sakata or Mexico with Manuel Alvarez Bravo or Sao Paulo with Sebastiao Salgado have claimed photographic distinction.

Setting the scene

In India, Sunil Janah and Raghubir Singh raised the bar in Kolkata. In Ahmedabad, the photography section of the National Institute of Design installed by Dashrath Patel brought a new visual consciousness to that city. Mumbai emerged on the photographic register through the works of Jitendra Arya and Mitter Bedi and the space they got in The Illustrated Weekly of India. In Tamil Nadu, Tiruvannamalai is on the international photography map for the outstanding archive at the Ramana Ashram of the photographs of the Maharishi.

Establishing the Forum for Contemporary Photography in 1993, with prominent photographers — led by Raghu Rai — signing up, did it for Delhi. The real shift, though, was the opening of the Photo-Ink gallery in 2008 by Devika Daulet-Singh, which catapulted the engagement with the photograph to an entirely new plane of ‘serious art’, with specialised curation, presentation and publications. It is not chance, therefore, that Daulet-Singh is curator for the second Chennai Photo Biennale.

Madras/ Chennai, however, has had a peculiar equation with photography. The Photographic Society of Madras, founded in 1857 by Alexander Hunter, is the oldest in India, yet there is little evidence of a photography movement here or of any critical discourse initiated in the medium or a publication around photographic practice.

Interestingly, the Madras College of Arts, also founded by Hunter, had a well-appointed photography section for a long time, but we haven’t heard of any photographer of repute emerging from there or even of any robust experimentation in the medium.

Media matters

The Hindu has an extraordinarily comprehensive and well-organised archive of precious images of the past almost 130 years, but the media world here has generated only two outstanding photographers in Harry Miller and Raghavendra Rao (who later built the photo section of Business Line).

Few remember that Chennai had an encounter with that most influential photographer of the 20th century, Cartier-Bresson, not once but thrice. The first time, in early 1950, he accompanied poet Harindranath Chattopadhyay and dancer Chandralekha to Tiruvannamalai, where Ramana Maharishi was confronting cancer. He is credited with the last living photographs of the sage. Seven months later, he passed through to Puducherry to capture the last living images of Sri Aurobindo. A third time, in 1966, he took photos of devotees around the elder Shankaracharya.

It was Cartier-Bresson who initiated Dashrath Patel into photography in Paris in the mid-1950s. When Patel came to live in Chennai, after quitting NID in 1981, he was to initiate the popular ‘alternate communication’ project of SKILLS and, for almost a decade, train the uninitiated in using the camera, setting up field darkrooms, and processing and printing one’s own pictures. He is hardly remembered here, but his saturation documentation of the habitat, craft and everyday life of people in the region constitutes a very special archive in itself. Then there is the unique body of his photographs of Chandralekha’s dance productions — unique because he was among the few photographers who understood how to photograph dance without freezing the dancer. Chennai remained unimpressed.

Naturalist M. Krishnan was arguably the most distinguished photographer the city produced. Easily among the most dramatic photographers of his time, each of his shots was a story in itself. He would toil for endless hours in the darkroom to produce some of the most luminous B&W prints one has seen. Here was a photographer whose name should have been high up in the pantheon of greats. So too T.S. Nagarajan, who, in his later years, made Chennai his home, but with little acknowledgement from the city.

Chennai has never shown great enthusiasm for the ‘still’ image. It is the ‘moving’ image of cinema that’s been of greater appeal. Chennai has resisted granting the photograph the mantle of a legitimate artistic expression — of a device that proposes the conceptual contradiction of spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, which contributes to the ‘real unreality’ of the photograph and lends it its continuing magical status. Of course, now in the digital era, its ubiquity and everydayness also drenches it in perpetual banality.

A complex context

It is within this context that the Biennale aims to make an impact on the city. It recognises art as a way to disrupt and question our times, something hardly acknowledged as necessary for the city’s growth. The curator’s task is also bedevilled by the fact that Chennai seems to exhibit a silent preference for ‘classical’ arts over contemporary. The Biennale’s challenge then is to invent itself as a bridge between these two worlds in as complementary a manner as possible.

The simultaneous existence of photography as high expression and popular culture has the potential to open up new spaces through a dialogue between the two. It will be interesting to see how CPB 2018 treads this space and, even while it showcases the national and the international, engages with the hinterland of local communities where every home with a photo album is a potential museum.

The CPB has been established as a not-for-profit trust, inspired by precedents set by the Kochi Biennale and others. It hopes to bring government bodies and corporates on board.

However, as Helmut Schippert, trustee and director of Goethe Institut, Chennai, says, the city can get lonely when one sets out to seek support for artistic work from public agencies. There is a lack of enthusiasm and a sense of constant pushback to creativity. The lack of a policy for the arts is painfully evident.

Chennai Biennale is not a sudden idea. Founder-trustee and photographer Varun Gupta began dreaming of it in 2010, when he created a show in suburban train stations for Art Chennai. He followed it up a couple of years later with a photo exhibition on the beach, in collaboration with Goethe Institut. And in 2016, the ambitious Biennale was conceived.

The idea of exhibiting in unconventional venues has remained. Along with the curator, the team is scouring the city for abandoned warehouses, cinemas, heritage sites, open spaces, spaces enabling institutional collaboration and so on. Photo festivals usually do not look beyond stitching a network of photographers, but a biennale is not just that. It seeks to engage with the character and temperament of a city and bring about a molecular transformation. Chennai — and the photographer community — wait with bated breath for the picture to develop.

The writer explores the charged space linking politics and culture through his work in media, pedagogy and the arts.

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