who am I ?

Who am I ?  

That is, I know, a deep, deep question.  But it is not the deeper religious or philosophical aspects that I am talking about when I ask that question now.

I was recently directed to an "influence ' my work (in the 1990s) on Photography and Identity, was having on the current crop of the new, younger Asian photographers.   The image I was led to was an obvious take off from my Collection of Indian Studio Photographs.  A collection I had begun in the 1980s as a very political attempt to recover a different way of looking at Photography.   A collection that was made famous as "the Satish Sharma Collection" in the mid 1990s when it was shown around Europe and published in a book/catalogue for an exhibition called "Street Dreams".

That 'Collection' created my identity as a "Collector" and effectively sidelined my 20 year career and Identity as a 'Photographer'.

 I had very consciously worked on the so called collection as a way of expanding my consciousness as a Photographer.  Something I had made clear in the first paragraph of my Introduction to the book and exhibition. 

The Satish Sharma Collection. It sounds strange and alien to my ears. Collections, to me, are about collectors. Rich Patrons investing in Art, patronizing artists and creating and controlling an all too powerful art world.  An art world that, through an Anglo-American history of Art, has created a world full of marketable creators of Fine Art – the Artists.  A collection is also a body of valuable and unique objects but I don't see these photographs as unique or  valuable  Fine Art.  They  are simple photographs – examples of  a popular culture, a specific response to Photography.  And Photography I see primarily, as an incredibly pervasive and powerful cultural practice.  This collection, then, is an attempt to recover and define an alternative cultural heritage- a post colonial history and an Indian, non western, cultural identity.

That the photographs in the book have become just something to borrow from visually while ignoring and forgetting about the politics behind the collection, saddens me deeply.   The Surface glance , the 'exotic' look of them,  is all that the 'influenced'  Artists and  younger photographers  now see and steal.  They don’t read the deeper political reason and message behind the  collection , it seems.  The message about the creation of an Other  Identity.  The importance  of  writing an'other' history of Photography and  recovering  an'other'  Identity  - as subjects and as photographers  from this part of  the world who need  to see and be informed by a different History  of Photography.

The  successes of that 'collection'  of Rotigraphy  (and not Rotiography, as the book -courtesy  the typos,  wrongly put it) created me as a collector , a writer , and a curator but it successfully  led to the sidelining my identity as a photographer . Something that I had  successfully been, for more than 20 years. 

The cover photograph for this issue of "Third Text" was credited with a " Photographer and Date unknown. From the collection of Satish  Sharma ".  I was, of course, not paid for the use of the photograph. Collectors, it seem  , are not paid.  Not by Third Text.  And not by the organizers of that exhibition and  the printers of the book. Or at least not if one is from this part of the ripped off world.

The fact that I can, and do write (and not just Photography) has also complicated my identity as a photographer.

A photographer who writes, curates, and also researches and collects photographs is too much for the world to handle, it seems.   The latter two identities of mine can be accepted quite easily, but my also being a photographer is just too much for people, especially photographers, to handle. 

To be accepted as a photographer I will, it seems, just have to stop being those other things that I am.   A rather critical writer and a curator/collector with a strong political agenda. That complicates the issue a bit too much, it seems. It makes too many a bit too uncomfortable. By raising too many questions. 

My multiple identities make Photographers just a bit too uncomfortable.  I have learnt that the hard way.   But the stubborn old me just will not change and project just a part of me as the whole of who and what I am.   

Not just a Photographer!