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

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

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

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