“Photographs can and do distress. But the aestheticising tendency of photography is such that the medium which conveys distress ends by neutralising it. Cameras miniaturise experience, transform history into spectacle,” writes Susan Sontag (2003:119). This epigraph needs to be seen in connection with the experience of viewing an exhibition of photographs by Sudharak Olwe held in a gallery space at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. My own reflexivity of being positioned in the default academic mode bears testament, as I regard myself coming uncomfortably close to placing the aesthetics of an image above all else. This is keeping in view the argument that aesthetics are an entry point to affect, and consequently the real world bears effects of such an image in being exhibited.
Sudharak Olwe’s photographs are exquisitely framed and superbly composed, so much so that they seem contrived; some are on the verge of being metaphorical. An obvious doubt about the staging of characters and elements for the sake of the photograph enters the viewer’s mind, and the already blurry boundaries between art and documentary photography begin to give way. Olwe is neither bound by spatial concerns, nor by the rules of photojournalism. He started out as a photojournalist, but the projects and photographs in question have been taken either in his personal capacity or in association with NGOs.
The set of photographs I am most interested in were part of his retrospective titled Invisible Visible, curated by Prof. Y S Alone, at JNU. Olwe has been documenting conservancy workers for close to two decades, picturing their working and living conditions, highlighting their plight and invisibilisation. In this set of photographs, there is a black and white photo of a conservancy worker, with his arms, bare torso and short pants drenched in slime from the drains. A shallow depth of field separates him from his background. The image is simply composed with a central placement of the subject, but imbues him with immense affective drive. The punctum in this image for me is the way the sludge is viscerally felt, transcending the limits of two dimensionality, strongly activating and engaging the sense of touch. The tactility embedded in the image is a result of the visual characteristics of the image, as the viewer is called upon to use her body in interpreting it. Laura Marks usefully offers a theory of haptic visuality, as one that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste (Martin-Jones, Marks, 2002: 442-446). Although she primarily uses this term for film, it is an interesting entry point into the affect encoded in this particular image. Haptic looking tends to rest on the surface of its object rather than plunge into its depth, it tends not to distinguish form so much as discern texture. It is a labile, plastic sort of look, more inclined to move than to focus (Edwards, 2009: 8).
The body is fragmented by Olwe’s framing, with an exposed torso, which could convey youth, eroticism and vitality in a different context, but here the filth clings onto the skin, changing its affect. Yet, the traces of eroticism remain on the bare, youthful body and its musculature. It is the muck which makes the dirtied skin tactile, and palpable, in the same way erotic images frequently use liquid or viscous fluid on nudes to strongly activate other sensory faculties, to open up more ways of consuming the image than just by viewing, and thus to increase the affective potential of the image. The eroticism of haptic images does not rest in their ability to make more tasteful images. Instead it is to multiply the forms of erotic contact and to replace the visual with the tactile and an identification with embodiment (Marks, 2002: 38). Here, the difference is in the juxtaposition of attraction and repulsion that is played out on the surface of the skin of the conservancy worker, with the body denying the gaze its pleasure. Tactile epistemology involves thinking with your skin, or giving as much significance to the physical presence of an other as to the mental operations of symbolisation (Edwards, 2009: 54).
Olwe forces the otherwise invisibilized filth of sewage pipes onto the senses of the viewers, the affective potential of this image is greatly enhanced by his specific editing choices. The rejection of colour eliminates any potential distraction, while contrast is drastically increased to give the worker’s skin a dramatic look, also making the texture of the muck sticking to the fabric and the body more palpable. Shadows and black point are turned up, while overall brightness is decreased and highlights are boosted, making the slime sticking to the body and the shorts shine, so that the variations in texture stand out. The materiality produced through the play of light comes to achieve an enhanced presence. The added grain simulating an old film-stock-look deserves special mention, for it is an editing choice that occupies an uncomfortable position between documentary reportage and fine art photography. This particular style of editing has come under a lot of criticism in the time of crystal clear digital images, the most common one being that this is a cliched and easy way to aestheticise street photos, increasing the drama of the image. In the case of this image, however, these concerns seem to be transcended altogether as the engagement of other senses come in. To put it in a banal manner, this image possesses the potential of activating the memory of stepping into or falling into wet and smelly filth and bearing with the associated disgust. This, along with several of Olwe’s other images, forces the audience to consider, or rather empathise with, and even embody to a certain extent, the daily experience of being covered in waste, which admittedly can have various emotional effects, from empathy to disgust, and anywhere in between.
The situating of photography in the network of contemporary art institutions, including the SAA gallery space, is not without problems, not least as it perpetuates an elitism and further removes the documentary mode from the dynamics of news reporting to the white walls of galleries (Carrabine, 2021: 349). Historically and socially, the association of privileged classes with such spaces does not help matters, but what is for certain is that to the socially conscious and engaged viewer, these exhibitions can serve a sizeable dose of guilt for their complicity in the structures of oppression. While acknowledging the neoliberal framework, it is still useful to look at liberal guilt as a productive force.
But let us apply the utilitarian lens to reach somewhere in this piece and ask the most common yet difficult to answer question for gallery based exhibitions – does it make a difference? As far as Olwe is concerned, I am relieved to be able to simply and emphatically answer, yes. The most direct proof is that his work, in the form of his book titled In Search of Dignity and Justice, was seen by Ratan Tata, following which Mission Dignity was launched to improve the lives of conservancy workers. There are other important ways in which these exhibitions work, as they visibilise the invisibilised labour capital of the country. As Foucault said, every relation is open to a counter conduct, that is, through the cultivation of a reflexive subjectivity it is possible to alter power relations, creating new knowledges and practices (Foucault, 1977-78: 191-226). This is the direction Olwe’s work moves in, for example, in the image explored for this piece, the strong haptic visuality encourages making oneself vulnerable to the image, reversing the relation of mastery that characterises optical viewing (Edwards, 2009: 44). His work challenges the regimes of truth through practice and discourse, and produces new ones. This can be seen at a practical level, for the plight of manual scavengers has entered the mainstream public discourse now, and there is regular news coverage with statistics on the deaths and individual stories of these workers. Once these enter the public discourse, a sensibility and sensitivity to their lives and conditions develop. Sensibility is wholly bound up with social welfare, as the records of eighteenth-century worldwide debates over poor law reform, the abolition of slave trade, missionary activity, and philanthropy demonstrated (Ellison, 1996: 354). Changes of a questionable nature at the level of policy formation and their implementation can be seen in some cases, such as the Delhi government’s decision to obtain equipment for manual scavenging (28.Feb.2018), even though the practice itself had been outlawed decades ago. Olwe demonstrates a deep understanding of these dynamics, emphasising the need for a sustained effort to achieve social change in this field. He exhibits his work in all kinds of spaces, from the white walled spaces to make-shift set-ups in remote locations, reaching audiences that even the news coverage of his exhibitions in the rarefied spaces would not. He teaches photography to students from marginalised communities, furthering a discourse by enabling more voices to come in, trying to help the subaltern speak, to finally create enough social pressure for any real change to occur.
The largely well knit exhibition had a mildly troubling dimension of including a few scattered pictures from tribal communities from Assam and Nagaland. They were shot in a very old school ethnographic style, in the pejorative sense of the term, and seem to have been superficially added into the overarching concept of social concern. Consider the photograph of a Naga family looking into the camera and smiling as they are engaged in farm work. A couple of lines from the accompanying description read as follows, “They are known for their courage and organic culture,” and “They have very distinct cultural practice and even food delicacies” (sic). Olwe thus essentialises these communities in the span of a few photographs, his aesthetically pleasing images stripping the subjects of their own agency, apart from being generically classified as tribal. As such, the problem is both with the photographic frame as well as the reductive title. It was somewhat difficult to digest this, especially in light of his nuanced and respectful treatment of other sensitive subject matters. The human condition can not be reduced to a set of aesthetic concerns, as it is fundamentally bound up with the politics of testimony and memory, denied outright to the individuals from north eastern communities. The aesthetic may be an interpretive entry point, but it can not deny the place for empathy or critique.
Photograph © Sudharak Olwe
Photograph © Sudharak Olwe
Photograph © Sudharak Olwe
Photograph © Sudharak Olwe
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1. Edwards, E. “Thinking photography beyond the visual?” in: Long, J. J., Noble, A. and Welch, E., (eds.) Photography: theoretical snapshots. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, pp. 31-48
2. Carrabine, Eamonn. “Just Images: Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology.” British Journal of Criminology. 52. 2012, 463-489.
3. Ellison, Julie. “A Short History of Liberal Guilt.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 2, 1996, pp. 344–371. JSTOR. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
4. David Martin-Jones, Laura U. Marks, “The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses,” Screen, Volume 43, Issue 4, Winter 2002, Pages 442–446
5. Foucault, Michel. Security, territory, population, lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978. New York, N.Y.: Picador / Palgrave Macmillan
6. Marks, Laura U. “Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media,” NED – New edition ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2002. JSTOR. Accessed 11.Apr.2020.
7. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003, p. 119
Copyright © 2021, PhotoSouthAsia. All Rights Reserved.
Vaskar Mech was invited to write this essay for PhotoSouthAsia by our Guest Editor, Suryanandini Narain. We encourage you to begin with Narain's introduction, The Distance of Difference: Photography on the Margins, and to also read Narain's other invited essayists:
Y.S. Alone: The Death of Ignorance: Photographs by Arun Vijai Mathavan
Bhavya Sah: Photographing Sex Workers: Understanding ‘Access’ and ‘Excess’ on the Margins
Copyright © Vaskar Mech
Vaskar Mech is a final year master's student in the department of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, hailing from Tezpur, Assam. He obtained his bachelor's degree in English (Hons.) from Khalsa College (University of Delhi) during which he was an active amateur photographer, covering events and exhibiting his work in college festivals. Shifting his emphasis to video in 2018, he made a couple of zero budget short films and, since late 2019, has been working with video documentation.
Mech cleared NET-JRF in Mass Communication and Journalism in June 2019. His areas of interest and engagement are virtuality, documentary practices, and new media.
20 November
