photography needs Ho Chi Minh - "He Who Enlightens"

I went for a talk about Indian photography this morning.  It was by a young photographer who thought of himself as one of the next generation of Indian photographers.   He is half my age so he is a new generation. But the work he showed had  nothing new or next in it.  It was a sad and  disquieting pointer to the state of photography in India and, in a way, around the world.    

Nothing that he showed , even vaguely, excited me.  It only served to reinforce my old take of photography in India being destructively derivative and driven by western ideas about what photography is and should be .

The west's higher paying markets for photojournalism  and the richer gallery/museum spaces for  a documentary style of photography  were the old drivers  of photography in India.  The international photography festivals and the new Workshop world seem to be driving the not really new, not really Indian, photography.

The Workshop circuit, by catering to the class that can  afford to pay for them, is recreating  a new feudal class of  closely connected and networked dilettantes.  Dilettantes who can afford to talk about stepping  away from the old Indian Photography defined primarily by photojournalists. A moving on !  A way forward from that outward gaze of the press and documentary photographer towards an inward look at personal lives.  Personally represented.  

What I saw was the  masturbatory me-too-ism of modernity re dressed as post-modern and the  facile face of the  Facebook  generation. A navel gazing negation of the all too necessary need to engage with the world. Not retreat from the raw reality of it. Even if that reality is increasingly harder to face and photograph.

What came through in the talk was also a continuing lack of any sense of history , the history of photography  in the world and in India . Something that has always been the bane of photographers in India.

The late Raghubir Singh had once written about Indian photographers continuing to reinvent the wheel because they had not read any History of Photography.  He was attacked for pointing out something that was pretty obvious.   The pointing seems to have been pointless. The history of photography continues to be ignored in India.It is not taught. It is not learnt.

 Photographers continue to re invent the wheel. Reproduce the past in a continuing chakra of  unaware and mindless, me- too- ism.

All those World Press awards, the Master classes and the Workshop workouts just seem to propagate a perpetual, shallow cycle of sameness.  A safe sameness that is universal, in fact.  

The universal spread of photography may have something to do with the sameness. The ease with which a photograph can now be produced and distributed is probably preventing a deeper involvement with the medium. A more critically thoughtful engagement that goes beyond the Image, beyond the 'I'mages of me and my doings.  

 Without an awareness and understanding of the Histories of  Photography  young photographers are doomed to do the already done . Again and again and again.

They will not change much if they do not go beyond the history of its aesthetic growth as a series of styles and isms.They have to explore the history of it use in hegemonic  wars of cultural conquer and control.

I was struck by how photographing  "the dark side" of life in stylised black and white became a problem for not just the photographer but also for the audience which actually asked for something 'livelier'. Something that was provided . In colour.  In, what seemed to me, a somewhat escapist  colour . The colour of Bollywood escapism. That eternal Indian Culture cliché that is becoming the flavor of the years for a certain kind of "Indian" Art Photography . The kind of Art photography that the west can easily recognise and accept as something  very "Indian" – as comfortable Orientalism, locally produced.

Can one just escape the 'Dark side', the empty underbelly of life that easily?  Learn to ignore it by saying that "Photography doesn’t change anything".   A line that even Raghubir Singh repeated to me when he first saw my work. A line he picked up, I think, in America. The America of Jacob Riis, strangely enough. But then, that was an America before McCarthyism. Before social Documentary became a 'documentary style'

Photography does change things. Photographers just have to look at how deeply it underscores and underwrites our advertising driven consumer culture. The very culture that drives the Me-Me- Me mania of the new, next generation. 

The Facebook generation has to look beyond "likes". It  has to learn to read books. Look at what they do more critically.  Look at how often the photography that 'can't change things' is actually censored all around the world because it does change and challenge  perceptions. It  actually did change public perceptions of the Vietnam war, for example.  It helped to stop that war. Even the American Armed Forces realize that. That’s why they invented the role of the Embedded Photographer for future American war theatres.

Before the new photographers retreat to a navel gazing negation of photography's increasingly overwhelming role in the world today they have to understand the power  of photography in today's world.

The World and the Photography world still needs many a Ho Chi Minh - "He Who Enlightens".  Enlightens the World and sheds light on  the Photography world. Camera 'Obscura' needs to become Camera' Lucida'.