to tell the truth about power - in photography
A "fearless photographic practice" that "tells the truth about power" Fascinating words that need to be taken seriously. But the power that I would like to tell the truth about is the power of the western gatekeepers in defining and controlling the discourse around photography in the world.
The paragraph about Raghubir Singh's work is so obviously Orientalist . His use of colour becomes "ways that put on display its spiritual richness". India, rich only as a spiritual space, ignores the reality of a land that had the full range of questioning aethiests, agnostics etc, all through it many millenniums. The description of sitting figure so carefully posed in front of the red Ambassador car becomes "an old pilgrim – a dhoti-wreathed, self-absorbed, bespectacled bag of bones" . The stereotyping of the Orientalist gaze strips India of its multifaceted reality as a country that has both billionaires and beggars . As does any other country in the world. As somebody said - every First World has its Third World and every Third world has its First World.
Photography has become so thoroughly prostituted as a means of visual exchange, available to all or none for every purpose under the sun (or none worthy of the name), that it is easy to forget that until relatively recently one of the most important consequences of fearless photographic practice was to tell the truth about power.
Photography, it has often been said, documents the world. This suggests that the photographer might be a dispassionate observer of neutral spaces, more machine than emotive being. Nonsense. Using a camera is the photographer's own way of discovering his or her own particular angle of view. It is a point of intersection between self and world. There is no such thing as a neutral landscape; there is only ever a personal landscape, cropped by the ever quizzical human eye. The good photographer, in the words of Bruce Davidson, the man (well represented in this show) who tirelessly and fearlessly chronicled the fight for civil rights in America in the early 1960s, seeks out the "emotional truth" of a situation.
But this show is not all about cocking a snook at authority. It is also about aesthetic issues: the use of colour as a way of shaping a different kind of reality, for example.
For Raghubir Singh, on the other hand, who is a contemporary of Eggleston and Mikhailov, colour is used to represent his native India in ways that put on display its spiritual richness like so many toothsome sweets on a counter.. His practice feels like a covert criticism of a Western addiction to the monochromatic and all that seems to be saying to us, existentially, about the soulessness of Cartier-Bresson's images of the loneliness of Paris. By contrast, Singh's "Ganges Modernism" proclaims colour as an aspect of spirituality. There is such a dynamic visual clamour in his colour-suffused friezes of teeming humanity: a Rajasthani village bus stop is infested by peacocks; an old pilgrim – a dhoti-wreathed, self-absorbed, bespectacled bag of bones – is caught squatting against a brilliant red Ambassador car; kites fly off the corrugated roofs of Ahmedabad as entire families clamber about the rising roof tops, egging on the dots in the sky to yet greater heights.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/photography-lives-through-the-lens-8142845.html
The paragraph about Raghubir Singh's work is so obviously Orientalist . His use of colour becomes "ways that put on display its spiritual richness". India, rich only as a spiritual space, ignores the reality of a land that had the full range of questioning aethiests, agnostics etc, all through it many millenniums. The description of sitting figure so carefully posed in front of the red Ambassador car becomes "an old pilgrim – a dhoti-wreathed, self-absorbed, bespectacled bag of bones" . The stereotyping of the Orientalist gaze strips India of its multifaceted reality as a country that has both billionaires and beggars . As does any other country in the world. As somebody said - every First World has its Third World and every Third world has its First World.
Photography has become so thoroughly prostituted as a means of visual exchange, available to all or none for every purpose under the sun (or none worthy of the name), that it is easy to forget that until relatively recently one of the most important consequences of fearless photographic practice was to tell the truth about power.
Photography, it has often been said, documents the world. This suggests that the photographer might be a dispassionate observer of neutral spaces, more machine than emotive being. Nonsense. Using a camera is the photographer's own way of discovering his or her own particular angle of view. It is a point of intersection between self and world. There is no such thing as a neutral landscape; there is only ever a personal landscape, cropped by the ever quizzical human eye. The good photographer, in the words of Bruce Davidson, the man (well represented in this show) who tirelessly and fearlessly chronicled the fight for civil rights in America in the early 1960s, seeks out the "emotional truth" of a situation.
But this show is not all about cocking a snook at authority. It is also about aesthetic issues: the use of colour as a way of shaping a different kind of reality, for example.
For Raghubir Singh, on the other hand, who is a contemporary of Eggleston and Mikhailov, colour is used to represent his native India in ways that put on display its spiritual richness like so many toothsome sweets on a counter.. His practice feels like a covert criticism of a Western addiction to the monochromatic and all that seems to be saying to us, existentially, about the soulessness of Cartier-Bresson's images of the loneliness of Paris. By contrast, Singh's "Ganges Modernism" proclaims colour as an aspect of spirituality. There is such a dynamic visual clamour in his colour-suffused friezes of teeming humanity: a Rajasthani village bus stop is infested by peacocks; an old pilgrim – a dhoti-wreathed, self-absorbed, bespectacled bag of bones – is caught squatting against a brilliant red Ambassador car; kites fly off the corrugated roofs of Ahmedabad as entire families clamber about the rising roof tops, egging on the dots in the sky to yet greater heights.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/photography-lives-through-the-lens-8142845.html
posted by Satish Sharma at
14:02
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