‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’
– Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Flowers have been one of the main objects of the economy of giving gifts for years. Be it funerals, weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, days such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day – giving flowers as gifts has been quite ubiquitous. Companies such as Hallmark and Archies spearheaded the greeting card industry and became synonyms for gift culture; images of flowers on greeting cards were an addition to an already existing economy of flowers. Memorialization of days such as birth or wedding has been exploited extensively by this gift industry.
Eva Illouz, in the introduction of the book Emotions as Commodities, talks about the connection between capitalism and emotional life and coins the term ’emodity.’ She argues that emotions produce commodities and commodities are produced by emotions. Flowers and greeting cards as commodities are a way to express and experience emotions (7). She further claims that the intensification of emotional life is in fact due to the ever-growing consumer capitalism, where emotions are constantly transformed into commodities (10). In the case of flowers, they have come to symbolize something more than themselves and have achieved a symbolic exchange value within gift culture.
Flowers and emotions are almost interchangeable, as Marx says, “…the commodity appears double in real exchange: as a natural product on one side, as exchange value on the other…”(75). Thus, an act of giving flowers is often driven by the popular ‘ideologies of emotions’ – feelings are codified within the act of giving and receiving flowers as a gift (West, 126). There is an emotional assurance that flowers, as a commodity, shall fulfill the expectations of a relationship. Images of flowers on greetings cards, digital collages, or even as emojis have come to bear the same burden of the exchange of emotions.
In photography, flowers have been a popular subject matter for many professional and amateur photographers. Not only to document from a botanical perspective, but also as a subject of beauty. Even before photography, flowers were an important subject matter in almost all forms of art and craft. Even in the post-digital era, circulation of visual representations of flowers has not waned. Flowers are among the most popular subject matter, along with images of sunset and sunrise amongst photographers today. The hashtag flowers on Instagram, a photo sharing website, will fetch you almost 133,000,000 images of flowers.[1] When something is photographed so ubiquitously, one wonders if it is even possible to reimagine the flower as a subject worthy of the camera. This essay reflects on this complex relation between flowers, emotions, photography, and heterogeneity of visual representation that on one hand sits comfortably within the argument of commoditized emotions as well as transcends it. This is explored by examining works such as Spring is Not Here by Ajit Bhadoriya and Mum in a Million by Anna Fox.
Ajit Bhadoriya is a Delhi-based photographer working on long-term projects around representation of urban middle classes in photography in India.[2] The stock industry continues to provide stereotypical images of India where streets are forever fetishized and poverty exoticized. Aileen Blaney and Chinar Shah, in the essay ‘The Aesthetics of Contemporary Indian Photography in an Incredible India,’ point towards this class and caste-based hierarchy within photography:
The farmer and the fisherman, whose wrinkles in the photographer’s hands become endowed with aesthetic value, are also frequently cast to appear in widely circulated photographic representations of India and Indianness, raising questions with respect to the class bias of generic images of India; the tendency for the camera person to belong to the middle class and frequency with which manual workers and children appear in front of the camera lens are revealing of some of the class hierarchies in operation (2).
In comparison, while the desires of the urban middle classes are often negotiated in the images of consumer culture, the realities of the urban middle classes are rarely represented within photography. Leela Fernandes in the essay “‘Nationalizing ‘the Global’: Media Images, Cultural Politics and the Middle Classes in India,” argues that ‘narratives of nationhood’ and ‘production of middle-class identity’ are closely linked to the visual representation of commodities post the economic liberalization of 1991 (615). The images of consumer culture have produced an imagination of the urban middle class in India, and remain an articulation of what one should aspire to be as opposed to being representative.
Bhadoriya’s ongoing series, Spring is Not Here, is a personal narrative of photographing flowers in his own house. He never felt comfortable bringing his friends home where he grew up and continues to live. Though he loves the home, it is not a space to exhibit to any outsider. He says:
I think it never fulfilled my idea of an ideal house where I would like people to come and judge me for the place that I inhabit. … It is difficult to isolate the exact reason for my inhibitions, but issues of privacy, class and aesthetics determined these undefined feelings of home. The kind of house I live in seems to have never been represented in photography. Photography has always been partial towards the elite beauty or the poor man’s hut. A middle-class household, filled with steel, plastic, and disjointed aesthetics of functionality is probably too coarse for the photographers.
A house that he managed to keep out of sight for almost thirty years, has now found its way into his images. His attitude shifted when his father, who works in a government office, intervened in the space as he started bringing flowers to beautify the home. These flower bouquets were the discards from his office. Officers and ministers receive many flowers on various public events that they would never take back home. At the same time, flowers bought to beautify the office get replenished every day, irrespective of the fact that the flowers from the previous day might still be fresh. His father, instead of throwing them away at the end of the day, started bringing them home and arranging them in variety of vessels from the kitchen such as plastic bottles, stainless steel jars and some other assorted containers of similar material.
Perfect and industrial-looking flowers such as lilies, orchids, and roses found a home in these everyday household items in a rather unexpected manner. Bhadoriya photographs this arrangement of exotic flowers cohabiting with home objects such as old plastic soda bottles repurposed and recycled to store drinking water, food often stored in plastic or stainless-steel containers, memorabilia such as trophies, clothes, and many such objects against the backdrop of a lived-in house and its various parts. He calls his father’s intervention of bringing flowers, ‘an unknown creative instinct’ and a ‘craze.’ The dining table grew smaller as the number of bouquets increased. For him, it was as if the space of the home was ‘encroached’ by these flowers and he hated it.
He felt that the flowers did not belong to this house. They were somehow too beautiful to belong with all the plastic, stainless steel, and the middle-class household in general. The hyper-realness of these flowers, their colors, shape and form – sometimes hard to even distinguish if they were real or artificial – felt somehow ‘misplaced’ in the home. These flowers that were meant to beautify the home or the office of a bureaucrat, now sat rather uncomfortably in his house. The aesthetics of these flowers did not cohere with the aesthetics of the house and its immediate environment. Out of frustration with these flowers, he started photographing them as a way to make peace with them. A house that he never thought was worthy of exhibiting became the backdrop of these images. Bhadoriya says:
These images chronicle my struggle with these flowers and my inhibition of photographing and making the space I inhabit public. They foreground the space I would never show anyone and the flowers themselves represent not only the incoherency of its existence in the space, but a feeble attempt at making this home “ideal.”
Spring is not Here © Ajit Bhadoriya
Flowers are the recurring theme in these photos. While the flower bouquets foreground the images, the motif of the flower repeats visually on plastic bottles, water jugs, designs on the sofa, mattresses, bed sheets, clock, tiles, and other domestic items. The ubiquity of commodification of flowers in household items becomes apparent in these images. But these are not the flowers that Bhadoriya ever imagined showcasing. These motifs were part of his daily life at home. A home he avoided to show even to his close friends.
The introduction of these new flower bouquets with their hyperreal aesthetics and surreal beauty is what disgusted the photographer to want to capture them. This paradox is quite symbolic of the state of the mind of the photographer. Though Bhadoriya hates these flowers, their homogenized beauty makes them worthy of foregrounding a house that he has carefully kept out of sight of outsiders. This may be the only way to represent a middle-class household and private spaces for the photographer. These images are not documentation of a house and people who live there, but a documentation of a desire to make something visible that otherwise must remain invisible. The formal aspect of the foreground and the background in an image collapses conceptually as the exotic flowers in the foreground are in fact background to a much larger narrative of representing the urban middle class.
As these flowers begin to droop, they are neither removed nor replaced. New flowers and those that have begun to wilt co-exist in the same space. Not throwing things away until they become unusable is a familiar value if one has grown up in an Indian middle-class family in the late eighties or even before that. These flowers that are meant to beautify the house remain on display even when they themselves are no longer beautiful and blooming. The perked-up flowers that sit side by side with these drooping flowers alienate them from being exotic and exhibit a sense of belonging in this Indian middle-class home. This is not a story of the exotic India. Nor is this a story worthy of the glossy pages of some magazine. It is, however, a story of many Indian families, rarely represented in the popular imagination of India.
Spring is not Here © Ajit Bhadoriy
Spring is not Here © Ajit Bhadoriy
Today, when almost everything finds articulation in photography and the world seems to have shrunk because of a certain kind of visual access we have, the same bombardment of visuals creates an illusion of having seen everything. We are constantly producing visual narratives to define ourselves. Dissemination of such visualized self manufactures identity of a certain kind. The imagination of India is also defined by these images produced and shared by government bodies, tourists, corporates, and its citizens. Though much of the Indian middle-class desires are reflected in touristic images or advertisements, rarely does a representation of day-to-day life of Indian middle classes appear in these shared and celebrated imaginations of India. Thus, images do not necessarily reveal as much as they hide. Often, photography becomes the carrier and reproducer of the oppressive systems and participates in further reinforcing these systems. It is not what is found in the images that reveals so much as what is hidden by these images. Bhadoriya’s act of photographing is an active engagement with resisting systems that force one to prefer not having representation at all.
British photographer Anna Fox, in the series Mum in a Million, photographs Mother’s Day flower bouquets. At the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, many old high-rise buildings were set to be demolished in Liverpool, UK. Leo Fitzmaurice and Neville Gabie analyze the beginning of these high-rise buildings as a ‘post-war optimism’ that saw these tower blocks as ‘the solution to overcrowding and poor living conditions.’ By the end of the twentieth century, mainly the working-class community and the retired inhabited these tower blocks. Fox spent some time between 2001 and 2003 photographing Linosa Close, one of the last standing high-rise towers in Liverpool that had deteriorated greatly and was waiting to be demolished. She spent time with the elderly residents of the tower who remembered their time in Linosa Close.
Fox was taken by surprise at the popularity of Mother’s Day in Liverpool. She made forty photographs of Mother’s Day flowers in domestic settings. These images were then displayed like wallpaper design with repeating patterns across a room in Linosa Close just before it was set to be demolished. Fox calls these ‘flower portraits’ a tribute to the women, Liverpool’s mother figures represented in many dedications in the newspapers to all the loved mums and the overall culture of zealous celebration of Mother’s Day with multiple hoardings carrying the message ‘Mum in a Million’ on the streets of the city.
Like Bhadoriya, Fox too photographs the flowers in domestic spaces. While flowers in Bhadoriya’s images are brought home by his father, Fox’s images of flowers are in fact gifts to the mothers. The thread of the domestic and flowers as a site to create new narratives remains constant, though both works are culturally and temporally far apart.
All the flowers in Fox’s images are also placed within the space of a home along with other memorabilia. It is not only the flowers themselves (real or artificial), but also the placement of these flowers and their surroundings which create a portrait of the people living in the house. These images are a glimpse into the private lives of these mothers and their families. Fox’s use of flash flattens the image, shrinking the hierarchy between the flowers in the foreground and the rest of the backgrounds. Here, the flowers and what surrounds the flowers are in even light and focus, bringing to our attention other details within the image that create a portrait of the people who lived in Linosa Close. These images in Linosa Close before its demolition are like remnants of memory lingering in the minds of those who had to leave and rebuild a new life. What remains are these images and memories of the home they all had to leave.
Mum in a Million © Anna Fox
Mum in a Million © Anna Fox
Images of Mother’s Day flowers also point to the ephemeral aspect of home that otherwise assumes permanence. These flowers are not here to last long, quite like the houses themselves. Fox’s choice of shooting flowers as a point of reference as opposed to other aspects of the house to memorialize this displacement freezes these flowers in a Bressonian manner, while the images wither away in the empty blocks of Linosa Close.
Many parallels can be drawn between these two works. Both photographers use similar visual strategies within a domestic environment to represent a story of belonging and memories. While Bhadoriya tries to foreground the flowers as subject matter, Fox’s images bring the flowers and the surrounding on the same plane. Fox’s images are not an attempt to hide anything around the flowers. These images are portraits of people who lived in Linosa Close and the story of a city undergoing massive changes of urban development. The images as wallpaper are an act of resistance as they make a feeble attempt at reviving the walls of the building about to be demolished. While Bhadoriya struggles to hide parts of the house, Fox’s images are not an attempt to hide, but to make visible what we do not see. These flower images from Liverpool, rooted in what looks like a house where everything belongs together, in fact, reveal stories of displacement and uprootedness. These technical and conceptual choices mark these two works as different and tell unique stories of representation of class-based negotiations between home and belonging.
In both works, flowers are neither the object of beauty and desire, nor do they sit comfortably within the history of visual culture around flower photography. Here, flowers become a metaphor for an economic and political structure that produces and shapes class-based social dynamics.
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Endnotes
[1] Accessed 23.Sep.2018. This number keeps growing every day.
[2] I understand that there can be no singular, homogenized definition of what constitutes the urban middle classes in India. For the essay, I refer to Bhadoriya’s identification with the middle class and its constitution.
References
Copyright © 2021, PhotoSouthAsia. All Rights Reserved.
Chinar Shah is an artist, writer, and an academic. She is the founder of Home Sweet Home, an exhibition series that uses domestic spaces to show works of art. She has received grants from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, Pronto - Göteborg Stad Kultur of the city of Gothenburg and AHRC, UK. Shah is an artist in a UKRI grant under their Global Challenge Research Fund, 2019. She taught photography and visual arts at the Srishti Institute for Art, Design and Technology, in Bangalore, India, and is co-editor of Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice (Bloomsbury, UK, 2018).
Copyright © Chinar Shah
20 November
