Examining Various Facets of Photography in the South Asian Context

Rahaab Allana’s edited volume Unframed on lens-based practices in South Asia comes at a moment of introspection for photography as a practice that has seen several turns in its nearly 200-year-old biography. Professionally too, this is a reflective moment for the editor who in the introduction, ruminates over more than two decades of work produced by the Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi, including exhibitions, conferences, books and other events from within and beyond its own archive.

The process of ‘unframing’ that the volume offers has to do with identifying and unpacking, understanding and critiquing the archival, institutional, theoretical, exhibitionary and artistic frameworks that have defined photography in South Asia. At stake is a redefinition of both, vernacular photography from the non Euro-American world as well as what is understood as South Asian lens based visual culture at large. As Allana says, “This volume presents photography as both an original media that can assume hybrid form, and as a political, historical and social resource that has radically expanded our understanding of artistic and activist engagement in colonial and postcolonial “South Asia”.”

The book’s essays appear under five sections, each informing the reader on photography’s origins, operations and impact in the region. They range between explorations of the self and the ‘other’ in the colonial context, the technologies of image production and circuits of representation, contemporary curatorial methodologies and national cultural politics and histories.

Even though the book does not claim to be exhaustive in addressing all photographic history in the region, it is an ambitious work towards a counter discursive space that departs from known theoretical Euro-American models of understanding the camera’s operations. It is hoped that Unframed shall see subsequent volumes that further address the currently overlooked issues of intersectionality, commerce and pedagogy among others, that shape our photography.

Unframed acknowledges the medium specificity of the camera, engaging with technological, aesthetic and institutional dimensions of photography within the larger socio-political terrain that it affects. The essays seek to interrogate how photography has addressed, affirmed and countered global assumptions about South Asia, how these countries are home and nation to diverse ethnic, linguistic and cultural communities, geopolitically bounded, but also challenged. The state is repeatedly evoked for its roles as the archivist, laboratory, pedagogue, patron, critic and censoring agency of photography. Essays on photographies from India’s neighbouring countries – Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar – draw new interconnections through the substratum of digital networks that cut across known realities of animosity and cooperation. These are illustrative of the true democratisation of the camera in a transnational space. As a volume that is chiefly concerned with how power is challenged by the fluidity and disobedience that photography offers, the essays highlight anomalies to expected differences of gender, caste and class in South Asia.

In each of its five sections, Unframed addresses the nature of the viewing gaze and its expectation from photographs to meet the claims of identity and selfhood in personal, local, national and transnational contexts. The category of the ‘vernacular’ interestingly subsumes the plebeian and the princely photographer from South Asia, discussed in the early essays of the book. In his essay, Allana dwells on the exhibition Ephemeral: New Futures for Passing Images for Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa in 2018 mulling over possible iterations of vernacular photography practiced locally, while Mrinalini Venkateswaran examines the nineteenth century archive of Sawai Ram Singh II from Jaipur, the first photographer prince to use the modern camera. Other practices such as the ethnographic works of James Henry Green (1893 – 1975) in Burma resonate with the photographs from Ceylon in the essays by David Odo and Ismeth Raheem respectively. The photographer Lionel Wendt’s (1900-1944) experiments in a modern photographic styles presenting a counter gaze to colonial stereo typification of the ‘native’ in Ceylon.

One is inclined to try and locate Unframed amidst other recently published edited volumes on photography, namely Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice, edited by Aileen Blaney and Chinar Shah (2020), Photography in India: A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present, by Diva Gujral and Nathaniel Gaskell (2019), and Points of View: Defining Moments of Photography in India, edited by Gayatri Sinha (2021). It shares overlapping concerns with these closely timed volumes, yet its focus on the socio-political flux that complicates South Asia’s political identity sets it apart. The inclusion of essays by Bakirathi Mani on diasporic Indian identity, or Hammad Nasar on the overall status of art practice in Pakistan offer wider contexts to locate photography, without addressing the medium of the camera in particular. Such inclusions allow Unframed to identify the larger frameworks that construct South Asian visuality.

The title of the volume claims to ‘discover’ new image practices, which it does along with new writing on photography from South Asia, but it posits these amidst established publications that mainly address Indian photography. The inclusion of older, landmark essays that have defined the discipline, say by the authors Christopher Pinney and Sudhir Mahadevan, locate, rather than ‘frame’ or subsume the South Asian photographic context’s dialogue with Euro-American theoretical investigations. What emerges is a possible set of new methodologies for examining photography. Pinney is known for his groundbreaking work on colonial and studio based photography in India in his books Camera Indica: the Social Life of Photographs (1997) and The Coming of Photography in India (2008), while Mahadevan writes on photography’s technological and ontological affiliations with cinema. Gopesa Paquette’s essay explores the possibility of photography’s dialogue with classical aesthetics from within South Asia, ranging from Darshan to Rasa theory, opening new ways of re-looking at our lens based practices. The late Aveek Sen’s lecture from 2010 titled ‘Between Blue Rocks’ addresses the important exhibition Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, held in London and Switzerland. Sen uses the literary as a tool for commenting on the photographic flows across these three countries. From the same exhibition’s catalogue is Geeta Kapur’s insightful commentary on the family as a subject of India’s key modern and contemporary photographers Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, Ketaki Sheth, Pablo Bartholomew and Dayanita Singh. In a sense, Unframed urges the reader to examine the rationale behind the political cartographies that divide South Asia within itself, in fact Saloni Mathur’s essay concludes Partition as a ‘method’ in social research that more broadly embeds photography amidst other visual art practices from the region.

The final essays and interviews of the book analyse photography within larger discourses on institutional, exhibitory and curatorial initiatives in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Pakistan, identifying ventures such as the Triennale and the other international art projects as formative junctures for photography’s public manifestations. Other histories of photography in print evidence the inter-ocularity of visual genres, as seen in the essay by Sabeena Gadihoke on the Illustrated Weekly magazine that ran between the 1930s and 90s, Omar Khan’s essay on photographic postcards and Sukanya Baskar’s re-examination of the global exhibition The Family of Man (1955), chiefly through its catalogue and press archives. Inter-ocularity re-appears as the central theme of an interview between Allana and Ashmina Ranjit, a performance artist from Nepal, her political activism taking form through the convergence of these two media.

Finally, the book’s design is to be appreciated for its attention to detail, the treatment of images that level between colour and black and white, and the non-hardcover, academic format inviting serious engagement instead of the leisurely perusal of a coffee-table publication. In fact, the text is granted a certain ‘visual’ space to foster meandered meaning making, an unusual but effective strategy for a book on photography.

Suryanandini Narain is Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University.