Wednesday 7 December 2011

from the economic times. jan 19992 - by sadanand menon


THE PEELING FACE OF POLITICS ON THE WALL
The unbiquitous face on the wall is amongst the most compelling street graffiti in India. Walls , road signs, bus-stops, railing, bunks, lamp-posts – any surface is converted into a canvas for sticking on the hundreds of thousands of pasty, multicoloured litho offset posters of mutton-headed politicians glorified into iconic deities. The condensation of a person’s entire politics into a series of tilt-up-mug-shots. It has, over the years, become the elliptical language through which the powerful conduct their one way communication with the powerless.

The doctored and glamorized image of ‘the leader’ succeeds in insidiously aggressing its way into the innermost recesses of a nation’s consciousness. It is a feat made possible by the manipulative process of photography which can invest the most mundane and pedestrian of visages with a lambency and beatitude that can provoke instant veneration.

In a society in which an entire population is in search of an identity those who can boast of’ possessing a face’ – like politicians, filmstars, TV newsreaders – are the ones who also’ possess’ the powers of self constitution. Iconism succeeds as it provides the deprived of a vicarious ad illusory avenue for self-actualisation. It is a first step in the creation of a landscape littered with ‘little men’.

Ironically, it is a cognitive knot that cannot be untied through the use of prosaic, verbal instruments. The only counter and antidote to manipulative photography is the visual weaponry of surrealist photography that can take those very images byt the scruff of the neck and wring them to a point that they become their own parodies and spew out their essential content. Also point out that ludicrousness and , sometime, the appositeness of certain juxtapositions of image and context in public. Luckily, in the New Delhi- based  Satish Sharma, the Indian shutterbug community has at least one such deep interlocutor of the form. For all one knows, the might be its only one.

For a decade now, the Nilgiris born Satish Sharma has been padding the streets stalking the ephemeral truths and hidden meanings behind those ‘faces on the wall’ . some of his stories are not too different from the chilling thought ironic original narrative of H.G Wells. He claims that the tendentious message in most of his shots of posters, by strange ’magical coincidence’ were premonitions of the events to follow. “The Photographer as seer,” he believes ‘can anticipate events before they happen.’

Satish Sharma’s quest, in his range of ‘political pictures’ has been to demystify the politician’s image, which he finds “is constantly glorified and monumentalized through the low angle framing”. However, in times when access to the politician is denied to the journalist the alternative is to seek an entry point, through his carefully planned and constructed image.

Besides, since his journalistic days, when Satish discovered that the ‘meaning’ of his pictures was being totally changed at the desk by the use of captions , he began, consciously looking for situations in which the caption was already contained in the picture and obviated the need for superimposed verbalizing. It was a pedagogic exercise in which the ambiguity of the image was sharpened through alphabetisation.
For Satish, photography is an extension of linguistics and, as such, the photo-frame serves as a ‘quotation’. He is candid when he says, “for me words are very important. Most of my work relies on using the word with the frame.” Without a doubt, Satish Sharma must be rated as India’s most ‘radical’ of photographers- someone who has penetrated to the core of ‘oppositional discourse’ in the photo-frame.

SADANAND MENON

Gallery Page, The Economic Times, January ‘92

Wednesday 12 October 2011

ART IN REVIEW; 'In Black and White'

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: October 29, 1999

Admit One Gallery

529 West 20th Street

Chelsea

Through Nov. 6

This selection of photography, subtitled ''What Has Independence Meant for Women in India?,'' is a slimmed-down edition of a show that appeared in Bombay and is sponsored in New York by an activist group called Sakhi for South Asian Women. (Sakhi is a term for a female friend or confidante.) Consciousness-raising is the intention, photo-documentary the prevailing style. Most of the participants live and work in India.

The work is arranged under broad thematic headings -- birth, religion and so on -- and veers between two worlds, one modern, the other deeply traditional and conservative. Some of the pictures tell heartbreaking stories: Zana Briski's shot of an infant girl lying abandoned in a hospital bed, Krishna Murari Kishan's view of the aftermath of a police rape, Sheba Chhachhi's record of a street march led by a mother protesting the dowry murder of her daughter.

Others seem to be more benign: views of fashion models in training caught by Rajesh Vora; Saibal Das's sequence of a bride leaving her parents' Calcutta home, Sheena Sippy's images of women taking part in self-help workshops, Pamela Singh's shots of dashing-looking Air Force pilots playing billiards.


It would be good to see any of these artists in more depth, and solo shows by outstanding figures like Ms. Chhachhi, Ms. Singh and Satish Sharma are overdue. Hopefully, Admit One Gallery, which opened last season and is one of a handful of Manhattan venues devoted to contemporary art from India (others are A Gallery in Chelsea and Bose Pacia in SoHo) will meet the demand. HOLLAND COTTER

Tuesday 27 September 2011

Words & ideologies

POST REPORT
SEP 26 -
The concept of ‘writing’ dates back as far as to the sixth millennium BC. The growth of human civilization led to the idea of trade and administration that required a definite form of information transfer and record keeping. Except academically, the eminence of writing today is almost never comprehended but a minute’s glance around the streets of almost any city in the world makes you realise the stream of information that is transmitted through words. Exploring the relation between wordings and their camouflaged role in directing city lives, through the art of photography, is the photo exhibition Texts and the City. The photography exhibition by freelance writer and photographer Satish Sharma is his attempt to display the role of “eye-candied texts” in the construction of the routine of day to day modern lives.

“I like to read, but reading a city is much more interesting than reading a book. This is what inspired the compilation”, says Sharma. Words are unknowingly driving our city lives. Advertisements, information, directions, texts play a big role in the ever-modernising global life. Photographer Sharma believes that globalisation is creating a single universal culture which may be destructive in that the cultural variation and diversity present globally is lost. His photographs are a symbolism of such ideologies. One of such photos shows the statue of Gautam Buddha, in all its cultural mightiness but with an advertisement of MasterCard in the same view. Another of his snapshots shows a school in the valley with the words “English Speaking Zone”, “Pepsi”, “Admission Open” and a kulfi-wala with his “Lovely Kulfi” cart, all in the same frame. The photographer says how the words Lovely Kufli written both in Nepali and English echoes his understanding of unified cultural dynamics.

From wordings on t-shirts to shops, advertisement boards and religious gears, Texts and the City provides the onlooker a unique view on globalisation and in the artists’ words, “The texts create a subtext and in large a meta-text of modernity is shaped.” Many of the snapshots are also satiric and ironic in terms of the texts written and the images represented. Images from Kathmandu, Delhi and Australia are included in the collection.

A total of forty six images are on display at the Siddartha Art Gallery, Baber Mahal. Also on sale, the pictures range from 15,000-30,000 according to their sizes.

The exhibition will be open till Oct. 17.v

Labels:

Wednesday 21 September 2011

text panel for my exhibition

Text panel for my exhibition.

TEXTS AND THE CITY
The creation of the first Cities and the invention of Writing lie at the roots of our very idea of Civilization. They began together and neither now exists without the other. Especially in our modern, market driven, metropolises. Metropolises that, this year, will be home to a record breaking number of citywallahs . Citywallahs who will out number their country cousins, for the first time in human history.
And for us history making citywallahs there is no getting away from the torrents of Texts that are the drivers of our urban, market driven and increasingly destructive duniya. Texts that are targeting us with a continuous volley of visual information. Information that is encapsulated by, or packaged around, the most powerful visual language ever invented. Photography ! Or rather, to be more specific, Photography as “Eye Candy” flowing ( in different photographic avtars) from the black barrels of lenses. Barrels that are more powerful than barrels of Mao’s guns.
It is these Eyeball grabbing photographic texts and their relationships with the construction and control of our selves and our consumer oriented cities that interests me. Pics are, after all, the rectangular visual bricks that actually construct our social and political landscape.
The image saturated cityscape we now live in cultivates a world view that has a clear hegemonic agenda. It is an image saturated mediascape that mediates and manufactures political, cultural and commercial, power. Its texts are loaded with subtexts. Sub texts that reinforce a dominant way of seeing. A way of seeing that increasingly negates other ways of looking. The iconic Decisive Moment (a la Henri Cartier Bresson) in photography, for example, has become a canonical metatext that precludes other ways of photographically seeing and shooting the street. And “seeing,” another Henri (Mattise, this time) reminds us,” is already a creative process. One that demands an effort”.
An effort that we have to make - to see and to unsee the seeing thrust down our eyeballs. See the spectacle for what it is. Images with messages creating a cultural landscape of desires and promoting a consuming culture of Greed. Greed over Need. Greed that our planet can no longer afford.
As Mahatama Gandhi said, “there is enough in the world for everyone’s needs. Not for everyone’s greeds”.
That is a lesson our cities have to learn. Fast. We have to learn to be questioning citizens and not be just image driven Consumers.
SATISH SHARMA

Tuesday 20 September 2011

TEXTS AND THE CITY

The creation of the first Cities and the invention of Writing lie at the roots of our very idea of Civilization. They began together and neither now exists without the other. Especially in our modern, market driven, metropolises. Metropolises that, this year, will be home to a record breaking number of citywallahs . Citywallahs who will out number their country cousins, for the first time in human history.

And for us history making citywallahs there is no getting away from the torrents of Texts that are the drivers of our urban, market driven and increasingly destructive duniya. Texts that are targeting us with a continuous volley of visual information. Information that is encapsulated by, or packaged around, the most powerful visual language ever invented. Photography ! Or rather, to be more specific, Photography as “Eye Candy” flowing, in different photographic avtars, from the black barrels of lenses. Barrels that are more powerful than barrels of Mao’s guns.

It is these Eyeball grabbing photographic texts and their relationships with the construction and control of our selves and our consumer oriented cities that interests me. Pics are, after all, the rectangular visual bricks that actually construct our social and political landscape.

The image saturated cityscape we now live in cultivates a world view that has a clear hegemonic agenda. It is an image laden mediascape that mediates and manufactures political, cultural and commercial, power. Its texts are loaded with subtexts. Sub texts that reinforce a dominant way of seeing. A way of seeing that increasingly negates other ways of looking.. The iconic Decisive Moment (a la Henri Cartier Bresson) in photography, for example, has become a canonical metatext that precludes other ways of photographically seeing and shooting the street. And “seeing,” another Henri (Mattise, this time) reminds us,” is already a creative process. One that demands an effort”.

An effort that we have to make - to see and to unsee the seeing thrust down our eyeballs. See the spectacle for what it is. Images with messages creating a cultural landscape of desires and promoting a consuming culture of Greed. Greed over Need. Greed that our planet canno longer afford.

As Mahatama Gandhi said, “there is enough in the world for everyone’s needs. Not for everyone’s greeds” .

That is a lesson our cities have to learn. Fast. We have to learn to be questioning citizens and not be just image driven Consumers.


SATISH SHARMA

Friday 16 September 2011

politics of representation - front page Republica

COMMENTARY
Politics of representation
SATISH SHARMA
Native image makers need to understand the dehumanization of forced removal/ relocation, re education/re definition – the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality. Your voice. You know and cannot often say it. You try, and keep on trying, to unsay it. For, if you don’t, ‘They’ will not hesitate to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said.
Trinh Minh-Ha in “Woman Native Other”, Indiana University Press, 1989

The first book of photographs from Nepal that I saw was the coffee-table heavyweight on the Ranas of Nepal. It looked like another book I had seen, decades ago, on Raja Deen Dayal and his “Princely India.”

Both books had a lot in common. Both were about exotic Eastern elite. Both were from collections of photographs archived abroad. Both drew from and fed into stereotypes of an exotic East. And both were about a grand, marketable past posited against a decaying and poverty-stricken present.

“Princely India” had, in the 1980s, pushed me to collect and create an alternative archive – as an “unsaying” of photography’s colonial construct – that was a questioning and reclaiming of an “other” way of telling of photographic stories. The studio photographs I collected, subjective stories that were anchored in a belief in maya and leela, created an oppositional discourse against the so called realist, objective, truth-saying of the very Western “documentary photography.”

They were subaltern stories, stories that challenged the all too Western, top-down, visual representations of my world. That collection of photos from Indian studios challenged the belief that the subaltern majority could not represent themselves and had already been represented by documentary photographers like me. Those photographs expanded my whole vision of photography, caught up as it was in very Western ideas and markets. Every photograph, I realized, was a document.

And these photographs actually allowed the subjects the right to represent themselves. Tell their own stories. Live their own little leela – all played out in small studio spaces and homes.



All photographs are cultural constructs. They are subjective viewpoints, not objective truths. And in archives, they are not just the raw material for our perception of reality; they are the creators of it. The trillions of photographs (more than 60 billion on Facebook alone) that exist in the world outnumber bricks, and construct us in ways that bricks never did.

They construct memories, identities and history. Photography changes perceptions and enables control of the sociopolitical structures of societies. In our postmodern world, the construction of any image of a country or region is seen as nothing but a manifestation of one group exercising power over another. National archives in national museums construct and encode certain notions of nationhood, notions that are rarely inclusive and certainly exclusive.

We need to move from static nationalistic archives to open networked digital databases, something that our contemporary digital duniya easily enables. Once we accept that representations are not definitive and final, we can use digital databases as new spaces that will allow a reworking, a recontextualizing and reclaiming of politically controlled pasts. We need oppositional discourses with many viewpoints, viewpoints and interventions that start a public debate about cultural domination and cultural identity, about the right to ink one’s own identity. Tell one’s own tales. Make one’s own memories.

These should be multiple memories to leave behind for picture-perfect posterity – something family pictures already do, and something that is already happening in social networking sites on the Web. If we do not take the initiative, we risk having our identities pictured for us, and images imposed on us by international and national archives. These are the archives that dominate the world, and they have to be culturally challenged.

This is exactly what the Nepal Picture Library is doing, as it begins its new journey toward a visually more varied and representative Naya Nepal.

Satish Sharma is an independent photographer, writer and occasional curator of photography. Retelling Histories is a personal history project that attempts to dig up, contextualize and archive photographs from old family photo albums. It is part of the Nepal Picture Library, recently set up by photo.circle with the objective of exploring issues of memory, identity and history through images.

A selection of work from the project is being exhibited from September 16-18 at Manga Hiti in Patan Durbar Square as part of the Kathmandu Literary Jatra.


Published on 2011-09-16 15:48:27