Master narratives , markets and meanings

I  first saw these pictures in 1987 when  I had an exhibition in the Ashram Gallery  and in Auroville.  What fascinated me was how the photographs were printed and used.  The signature black border of the full frame printed, signifying the  Bresson Frame, was missing . Not surprisingly, the Ashram photographs served a different purpose. A purpose that was definitely not about the Bresson  aesthetic -the full frame of the Decisive Moment defined at the Leica click and not reframed by the printer at the printing stage to make a better Picture .

The Ashram photographs were venerated differently.  For the Content  and not the Form. Thousands of prints must have been churned out for the Ashramites  and for the followers of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.There was no attempt to limit the editions and raise the commercial value .Something that will happen now, as the Market reframes and  repurposes the photographs as something to be collected. Bought and sold for pure profit as the work of  an eminently marketable  Master of Photography and not as the venerable portraits of  true Masters for whom the Market certainly did not matter.


In Henri Cartier-Bresson’s life that remained eventful till the end, one chapter belonged to the photographer’s visit to Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry in the ’50s. The father of modern photojournalism had of course been to India earlier, met Mahatma Gandhi and even covered his funeral. All of that remains well-known but his work on the Ashram remains comparatively less talked about. Bresson, it is said, had a knack for bearing witness to historic moments. So this time too, he was there shooting Sri Aurobindo, the revered yogi-philosopher-guru-poet, just a few months before his death.


http://www.thehindu.com/arts/art/article3874369.ece?homepage=true