1. What is your earliest memory of how or what attracted you to photography?
I must have been about 13. I remember sitting on the floor in a darkened room in Nungambakkam, Madras (now Chennai), fascinated and awestruck as I looked at a series of slides taken by Dashrath Patel of textiles being dyed on the banks of the Sabarmati. They were both beautiful and powerful – and I became very curious about the possibility of creating something, images, with this sort of strength. I liked to draw from when I was little, but nothing I had drawn or painted had the quality of these photographs.
2. Did your interest in photography come about because of your education at NID?
In a way, that first contact with Dashrath led me to NID. However, before going to NID I was at Chitrabani, Centre for Social Communication, Calcutta.
I was a student of the Diploma Course in Social Communication, possibly the first in the country. It was an experimental course, radical in its framing of the ‘city as classroom.’ The center, founded by Fr. Gaston Roberge, an eminent film theoretician and media scholar, along with Satyajit Ray, was engaged in a long-term photographic documentation of the city, focused on its marginalized citizens, called Shaheed Minar.
A small, committed group of photographers including Brian Balen, Salim Paul, and Ardhendu Chatterjee, were building a socially conscious document of the poor and disadvantaged of Calcutta. This work was contextualized in a critique of the way Calcutta’s misery had become visual fodder for so many photographers and filmmakers, both Indian and international. Critical media theory, vigorous debate around histories and politics of representation, along with attempting to develop an ethics for photographic practice nourished the fecund environment within which I learned to read photo-language and was exposed to photography from all over the world. The discussions ranged from thinking about which lens and angle produced an image that offered the subject dignity, analyzing mass media images, decoding the greats of ‘street’ photography to reflections on the ethics of photographers in conflict or war situations.
I was also an intern and was given the task of indexing part of Shaheed Minar – a small print of each photo was pasted on an index card, annotated, and filed. I must have made hundreds of cards!
My time at Chitrabani was formative, but I did not really work with the camera myself, apart from some tentative explorations with my father’s old Rolleiflex. It was at NID that I began to work with the camera seriously. At the time there was no course devoted to photography. I studied visual communication / graphic design, which included photography, and basically began making photographs on my own. I trained in the darkroom, entranced by its particular magic, shared contact sheets with peers, and also with Dashrath Patel who would offer only occasional, offhand comments.
On my way to the institute, I used to pass by the back verandah of a temple, where many poor people sat, slept, and lived. It was a motley, mutable crowd. I began to notice a half-naked woman who seemed to have established her ‘home’ at one end of the verandah. One day, I stopped and tried to talk to her. She acknowledged my presence but did not really speak. I began visiting her, carrying, once again, a borrowed camera. I would sit with her, often in silence, watching her, listening to her, and finally photographing her. This was Subbhadra, the first woman ascetic that I photographed, and my first ever photo-essay in 1979.
3. If you were to design a photo program for young Indian photographers, what would it look like?
A degree course where sustained study, interaction, research, and the actual making of projects are all included. In addition, the confidence that accompanies a proper degree is an asset in today’s competitive world, and useful for opening doors with potential commissioners, etc. However, the degree course should incorporate workshop methodology and mentorship as well.
4. Who or what has inspired you to pursue photography and/or continues to do so?
I moved from photography to creating installations that work with space, light, sound, moving images, sculptural objects, but the photographic image lies at the heart of my practice as a contemporary artist.
There are several reasons why I remain attached to lens-based image making.
The photograph embodies a contradiction – on one hand, its capacity for verisimilitude (therefore its reception as a ‘true’ representation of reality, value as evidence, as document, etc), and on the other, its interpretative power. This tension fascinates me – and offers a wide range of possibilities of image-making around my social, political, and philosophic concerns.
I see photography as a relational image-making practice – and I don’t mean only when photographing people, but also landscape, architecture, or wildlife, whatever – the photograph is a mediation of the world that is embedded within the social, the historical, personal and public memory.
This quality of relationality extends from making a photograph to its being seen, opening up the possibility of dialogic communication with a wide range of viewers for whom photography is both every day and potentially extraordinary.
5. What draws / drew you to the subject matter you are pursuing in your current work?
My engagements tend to be long term – for the last two decades or more, I have been preoccupied with questions around ecology, the destruction of the environment, and knowledge systems that offer different sightlines into the relationship between humans and the earth.
This preoccupation had been developing for some time but got sharpened around 2000 as I witnessed the hyper urbanization of Delhi. The physical and social atmosphere was becoming toxic. Every time I ventured into the city, even briefly for a simple errand, I would return with watering eyes, skin rashes and a feeling of unease, physical and emotional discomfort … it felt like I had encountered poison. When I traveled, on returning to Delhi a refrain would play in my head ‘poison city poison city.’ I began to research poison – from the medical uses of poison to homeopathic texts, to alchemical texts, myths, folklore around poison. This led to the creation of a large installation, which uses photographs and video along with light and sculptural objects, titled Neelkanth: poison /nectar, which displaces onto the Indian city the Hindu myth of Shiva swallowing the poison that threatened to destroy the world.
Research – wide-ranging and often eclectic is central to my projects. I research, browse, reflect – and then research and reflect again – building a wide web of associations before zooming in to the images, ideas, forms that I may work with. A bit like a dog circles before settling down. Then comes the creation of actual material. This creates, in turn, its own sets of connections suggesting different ideas. I move back and forth between these modes, concept to form, slowly the work comes together – and then of course there is a period of concentrating on formal and building / making aspects.
A particular work may be provoked by a specific experience, as in this example. It could be a newspaper report, an insight from an academic text, an image glimpsed in a dream or hypnagogic state, an observation while at a traffic jam, a conversation … but it is usually something which connects with and is held within the larger frame of a continuing inquiry.
To give another example: I had first encountered women mendicants / ascetics in my trips into rural Bengal as part of a folk media study project while at Chitrabani. They fascinated me, and certain images from then have stayed with me till today, though I did not photograph at the time. Then, while at NID, I photographed Subbhadra as described earlier. Many years later, in the early ’90s, I read Speaking of Siva, translations of ‘vacanas‘ (poetic texts) by four major saints of the 10th/12th century Bhakti movement, from Kannada to English by AK Ramanujan, the late scholar, and poet. I was struck by the powerful poetry of rebel, mystic, and poet Akka Mahadevi. What particularly interested me was the bringing together of the erotic and the spiritual, in a culture where the two are normatively opposed, the scathing rejection of conventional female roles, the articulation of the body- self-relationship – her voice was absolutely contemporary! I had already encountered and been drawn towards women ascetics in my travels. I was also interested in looking at indigenous, pre-modern forms of feminism, irritated by the constant accusation of being ‘western’ that the women’s movement faced. My own cultural knowledge indicated that this was not necessarily true. Deeply affected by Akka’s couplets, I began researching women ascetics from ancient and medieval India. Although there was very little sociological work at the time, I found a rich repository of poetry, stories, images, and hagiographies from the sixth century onwards. Feminist scholars retrieved some of these texts, as part of the significant project Women Writing in India, 600 BC to Early 20th Century; others I found through oral traditions, visual representations, and popular songs.
The stories often involved bodily transformations. Several of the women saints wandered naked, singing or reciting their poetry. Much of my thinking and work has been and continues to be focused around body / identity, sexuality / gender, fluid sexual and gender identities. This aspect of self- transformation of the body was crucial to my interest – and it was in the community of women ascetics, present and past that I found fascinating modes of inhabiting, subverting, and transgressing bodily markers of gender. The set of photographic portraits in Ganga’s Daughters, including the B&W series Initiation Chronicle, was made over 10 years of meetings with women ascetics. My very first installation, Wild Mothers I, 1993, worked with this archival material and included two portraits of living women ascetics. However, I only showed this as a body of photographic work in 2005 and later added a video animation using found images.
6. Do your projects typically run in parallel, or do you focus on one project at a time?
I prefer to focus on one project at a time, but sometimes certain long-term projects continue in parallel, as in the case of the work on women ascetics. Multiple timelines seem to operate – the largest arc of engaging with an issue, the longer duration of developing work around an aspect of it, over several years, and the shorter focus on making one project. Circumstances can determine which aspect comes to the forefront at any particular time. In a sense, there are no ‘breaks’ as everything overlaps, one flowing into the other.
7. Can you tell us about your continued engagement with feminist issues and how you brought in other forms of expression to your documentary images? The 1980s saw you making photographs that were rooted in the traditional documentary genre and then there was the shift to your early installations in the 1990s. Can you tell us about this shift?
I began as a documentary photographer, and activist, deeply engaged with the women’s movement in Delhi. I photographed the women’s movement through the 1980s, pointing the camera one moment, shouting slogans the next. After ten years of creating images, which interrogated stereotypical representations of women, I realized that my own images of militant, struggling women had possibly become a new stereotype.
I was troubled by the power relationships that seemed embedded in the canon of documentary photography and which were, perhaps unconsciously, structuring my own practice. I had serious questions about photography’s claim to truth and the assertion of objectivity, which seemed to serve the manipulations and occlusions of the dominant media. The colonial history of photography in India and its deployment by the state to further and maintain both governance and ideology threw up more questions. Were we as photographers in post-independence India reproducing these relationships? I understand and practice feminism as a political philosophy which analyses and critiques power relations in a patriarchal society. As a feminist and socially conscious photographer, I felt it was important to find a way of creating portraits which shifted away from the colonial recording of ‘natives,’ unconsciously reproduced in post-colonial documentary practice, to a representation of ‘citizens,’ with agency and control over their own representation.
In 1990, I invited seven women activists – friends, sisters, and fellow travelers – to collaborate with me in developing a series of staged portraits. Each woman chose a place, a posture, materials, and objects that she felt would speak of her, tell her story. The process of developing these ‘theatres of the self’ was complex and long-drawn, developed through intense, intimate interaction over several months.
Drawing on vernacular practices of bazaar studio photography, yet significantly different, I attempted to create a space of inter-subjectivity, eliciting a self co-determined by the subject’s agency as much as the photographer’s gaze. I was seeking a path through the complex ethical issues that arise from photographing the ‘other,’ a possibility of bridging alterity.
This experiment in collaborative portraiture was to fundamentally alter my work as a photographer. Building an intimacy, an empathetic relationship with whoever I wished to photograph, and inviting them to choose how they wished to be photographed became basic to my photographic practice and remains so today.
In doing this, the asymmetry of power between the representer and the represented is addressed to a certain degree. Further, making the construction of the representation itself explicit is a refusal to participate in photography’s claim to truth.
What emerges is a form of portraiture that lies between the vernacular tradition of bazaar studio photography and the documentary. The photograph is staged, the subject aware of the camera and often looking straight into the lens. A performance of the self is elicited – a self that is historical, social, and includes the intangible contradictions of memories, dreams, and fantasies. The performance rises within the frame of the dialog between the photographer / camera and the performer, naturally contingent on the nature and depth of the conversation.
Today the staged photograph has become ubiquitous; selfies rule the image field and questions about the ‘truth’ of the performed self seem redundant. However, in India, in the early ’90s, this work went against the prevailing canons of documentary photography and photojournalism and faced considerable criticism within India.
Assumptions about the indexical nature of the photograph continue to pervade the quotidian visual realm, and examining the truth claim of photography opens vexed questions around objectivity, representation, and the nature of the real. Interested in making the subjective and constructed nature of photography explicit and working with the photograph as fiction rather than a document, I moved from documentary practice to developing staged collaborative portraits.
By the mid-’90s, the arena of photography itself was transformed. The bazaar studio tradition had been recuperated into publications, collections, and galleries and a number of photographers were exploring the possibilities of the staged photograph. The puritanism of the documentary canon lost its bite with the advent of digital manipulation.
I too had moved into new territory. On one hand, I was troubled by the commodified consumption of photographs, whether in media or art space. On the other, relocating the photograph as an object within sculptural space offered the possibility of reconfiguring the habit-ridden encounter with a photographic image. I wished to reinvest the viewing of photographs with time.
The first of a series of photo-based installation works, Wild Mothers I, was made in 1993. It explored the territory of female experience mined with patriarchal oppositions between sexuality and spirituality, the body and the spirit, the sacred and the profane. Hand-tinted B&W photographic portraits of women ascetics were held within yonic terracotta sculptures. These rested in an expanse of sand and pigment akin to an archaeological site, littered with broken fragments of terracotta tablets carrying the poetry and representations of such women from the fourth century onwards. I wanted the viewer to journey through these fragments of history before encountering the portraits of living women ascetics.
As I explored the rich and complex negotiations of gender and womanhood in the heterodox world of female mendicants, the Hindu woman was being actively re-inscribed within upper caste orthodoxies. Many of the gains of the struggle for women’s rights were appropriated via television serials, the valorization of sati and the invocation of Shakti within Hindu right-wing discourse. Myth and history were being rewritten, as the attempt to construct a homogenized Hinduism was forged in the fire of violence, intolerance, and sectarianism.
Wild Mothers II, 1994, brought images from the ’80s of women in protest together with portraits of women ascetics, contiguous with representations of female power from multiple religious and cultural traditions. The installation invokes multiple representations of female power to create a multilayered mirror. A mirror in which we may meet such women, recognize ourselves in them, as them in us. It offers the possibility of building a subjective relation with and between women, who in disparate ways seek both inner and outer transformation. The piece seeks to affirm the capacity to imaginatively reclaim traditions increasingly appropriated and abused by fundamentalist ideologies.
Installation art in Delhi in the early ’90s was both new and somewhat suspect. I was especially suspect! Was I a photographer? Was I an artist? Was I an activist? Why were words so important in my work? As I continued to develop photo-based installation pieces, alongside a continuing photographic practice and engaged activism, I felt that I had found a form that was right for me – one that offered the possibility of a substantial inquiry into the complex, multiple nature of the questions that preoccupied me.
Activist modes of communication had become increasingly dissatisfying. Making political interventions, educating communities and advocacy seemed to necessitate limits being placed on the expression of contradictions, complexities, and confusions. I was interested in making a kind of reflection usually reserved for the academic or cultural world accessible to ordinary women. I brought women’s groups, students, and activists into the art space. Organizing discussions around the work was an integral part of the exhibition. Whenever possible the work traveled to different contexts – community centers, meetings, conferences, and activist gatherings.
In the creation of the work itself, I sought to dissolve the boundaries between viewer and participant, between the women represented in the works and myself. I was seeking a kind of inter-subjectivity – where my ideas, feelings, perceptions were intertwined with the self-perception of the women I photographed or researched. Where each image I created of another woman was as much a self-portrait as it was uniquely hers.
8. You have had a long commitment of working with water — earlier seen in the imagery of the Yamuna Series, in Water Diviner, and then Black Waters Will Burn. How did this come about?
I have always had a great affinity with water – some of my most pleasurable memories and experiences are about water – rivers, lakes, the sea, and even a brief excursion into scuba diving! Being near, or preferably in water is where my body, heart, and mind come to rest….
On the other hand, I have witnessed the struggle, particularly of women, for water – the fights at the community tap in bastis, the long walks from the well in rural areas….
So, it is with deeply felt personal sorrow, apart from grave ecological and social concerns, that I have watched the waters of our land, and particularly our city, Delhi, turn black and toxic. From the mid ’70s, as a student, I would often frequent the banks of the Yamuna. In the ’80s and ’90s, I spent time walking along the river, and visiting mendicants who lived on her banks. I befriended and photographed a woman ascetic who had a small hut cum temple near the ghats and got to know a bit about the diverse subcultures that flourished there, both ancient and contemporary, through my friendships with ‘sadhu samaj’ and those who were well accepted within the community.
While the river was changing, growing dirtier and with an increasingly foul smell, it was as we entered the new millennium that my increasing preoccupation with urban ecology, and the looming crisis over access to clean water in the city, led me back to what was now a poisoned river.
I went to the other end of the river, to Okhla Barrage, and photographed the bizarre white effluent pouring across the river with boatmen rowing through this to fulfill the rituals of death. Saw the urbanization of what was once a relatively pristine area. These photographs appeared in a triptych of animated lightboxes I made in 2005, The Yamuna Series. In these light boxes, women move across a surreal landscape of urban detritus. While one witnesses the erasure of the last areas of the wilderness by uncontrolled urbanization, another holds identity papers aloft, fragile protection against impending displacement. The lightboxes occupy a precarious space between stillness and movement, echoing the precarious lives of women in the city. Empty water taps, the urban grid and displaced women float above the bizarre beauty of a river frothy with effluents, studded with plastic.
The politics of urban planning had reduced the waters of the river Yamuna to narrow drains, her floodplains to potential real estate. The triptych of animated lightboxes, ersatz television screens, act as a painful reminder of the condition of the river in Indian cities.
A few years later, I was invited to be part of 48 Degrees, a citywide public art project initiated by Khoj International Artists Association, curated by Pooja Sood. We began by visiting potential sites with an urban planning team led by the architect Arunava Dasgupta. It was while walking through these sites in the northern and central parts of the city, absorbing details of their layered history, that I realized how much of what we stand on, gaze at, was once water. From the dried-up lake of Roshanara Bagh to the teeming thoroughfare outside Old Delhi railway station, today’s dry, dusty, polluted, and fraught cityscape shimmers and dissolves into waterways and water bodies of less than a few hundred years ago.
As residents in this rapidly changing metropolis, our relationship to water seems to be defined primarily through the daily questions of needs and resources. The issues of access, control, and distribution, along with the horrific possibilities of scarcity that confront us, further determine us as desperate consumers trying to claim our rightful share of a less and less available commodity. On the other hand, we have an abundant, active symbology of water within the multiple cultures that enrich this city. Ideas about the sacredness of water, its life giving, purifying, and transformative qualities, remain embedded in local mythologies even while the religious / ritual use of water has itself become commodified and exploitative.
Is it possible to recover experiences and memories of water that go beyond consumption?
The question led me to a serendipitous discovery. On the chaotic pavement facing the old Delhi Railway Station, like a missed beat, stood the Delhi Public Library. At the entrance to the late colonial building was a small, barely noticeable plaque. The faded letters commemorate the inauguration of a swimming pool in 1934!
Past the main library sections, entering a small, easily overlooked doorway, I encountered a surreal sight – bulging from the wall was a lion’s head, jaws agape, surrounded by stacks of old newspapers – an old aqueduct, encircled by a stone font.
A short flight of stairs led down from the fountain into a large space, the floor sloping to the far end. Piled high with bundles of torn books tied with string, broken furniture, rotting mattresses, tangled lengths of electrical wire, this tattered archive was once the colonial swimming pool.
For the next five months, I had no physical access to that space. But that first encounter was powerfully etched in my mind. I began to mentally inhabit this strange underground cavern even as a wide range of materials – scientific, historical, and mythological – began to coalesce. A map of Shahjahanabad, circa 1830, showing the waterways and gardens of the area; stories of the goddess Yamuna, replete with transgressive desire; miniature paintings recording the culture that flourished along her riverbanks, reports on the incursion of the Tilapia fish, which flourishes in toxicity, the disappearance of the dolphins. Trawling the waters of history and cultural memory, entering the layers of time that mark the site, the sense of lost epistemologies grew critical; the focus, of course, was the crisis – around water and the river. Seeds of eco-philosophy surfaced illuminating knowledge systems that could generate material acts of conservation and regeneration.
Earlier research that I had done on the River Yamuna (The Yamuna Series, 2005, Locust Time 2008) and my ongoing concern with the toxic condition of the city (Neelkanth: poison / nectar, 2003/8), also fed into the evolution of the work. I resurrected the long-dead fountain. Tens of thousands of de-acquisitioned books were added to those already there. The stories, paintings, as well as aerial photographs of the numerous dams that siphon off the river’s waters as she descends from the mountains became animated lightboxes in the form of illuminated books.
Lights, video projection, the sound of falling water permeated the immersive environment.
The artwork itself became an instrument, akin to the sensitive forked stick used by water diviners to sense the presence of water deep below the surface of the earth: a receptor tuned to enable the viewer to read the subterranean histories and mythologies of water murmuring below the city’s crowded streets, congested rooms, and ceaseless rivers of traffic. Probing the sedimentation of time, culture, and memory, through the colonial back to the Mughal and then the pre-Mughal to calibrate an imaginary geography, the installation offered each historical trace as a sensory cue, inviting the viewer-participant to become a water diviner. This was the installation The Water Diviner, at the Delhi Public Library, 2008. Oddly enough, considering that it was so site-specific, the work traveled to many other places.
Returning to the river in 2010, after a gap of almost two years, I found the paradox between the continued indifference to the choked and stinking river and the fervent daily worship of Yamuna Devi unbearable. Each offering made to the river goddess seems to reenact this disconnection between the eco wisdom embedded in her myths and her actual desperate condition. Underlying this paradox is the feminine theology of water itself; sacralizing nature both generates the desire to protect as well as obscures the need to protect. The divinity gets dematerialized – separated from her riverine body, and perceived as all-powerful and metaphysical. Yamuna Devi is, after all, a mother, and like all mothers, culturally expected to take on more than she can bear.
The visitor ascends the curved slope made of gunny bags painted with verses from the Yamunaashtakam, a hymn of praise from the 14th century, to confront a murky expanse of water. On one side, a 100-year-old iron bridge reverberating with traffic, on the other, a huge, white-bandaged object, 9.5 meters by 4.5 meters, floats on the fetid waters. Seed, sea creature, vulva – a wounded female form, pristine when first placed in the water, gathers the detritus of the river: leftover ritual offerings, plastic bags, dead dogs, cigarette packs. Soon enough, her bindings become soiled, stained as much by the water as by the asphyxiating methane that rises off the water. As dusk falls, tongues of flame rise off the toxic fluid, engulfing her in a simulated fire; downstream, the denizens of Delhi consign their dead to real fires in an optimistic purificatory rite.
Black Waters Will Burn extrapolates this condition to the not-so-distant future to provoke a more productive examination of the present, confronting the city with a futuristic vision based on both scientific principle and prophecy. Highly toxic rivers can and do burst into flames. Water can turn into fire.
This last work was born out of despair – at a city, its governance, its planners, and its citizens – which has turned its back to its own river. A mere 50 days of lockdown, which has only stopped industrial emissions but not domestic sewage dumping, has left the waters cleaner. The Yamuna can be resuscitated. But will this happen?
I continue to work around water and the last piece is an animated lightbox, Seventy Synonyms for Water in Sanskrit, 2013.
9. You have developed a new artistic language — that of the moving image lightbox, which uses a series of still and moving layers of photographic images to an almost cinematic effect. How did you arrive at this?
I have always enjoyed and been interested in urban folk culture, and the objects that it produces. While visiting old Delhi, my attention was directed by a friend to a popular toy sold on the pavement and in the little shops outside the Jama Masjid. These were small toy TVs made of cardboard and plastic. Inside the box was a simple incandescent lightbulb, over which was fitted a translucent cylinder carrying images. The heat of the lightbulb made the cylinder rotate, throwing a kind of projection onto the screen. The images were diverse. They could be religious, from the movies, or simply popular. I was delighted by the ingenuity of the device! It reminded me of early pre-cinematic devices that used the mechanical movement of a still image to create the illusion of a moving image. I was also intrigued by the distortion that appeared at the edges of the image on the screen.
I adapted the TV, exaggerating the distortion and used a number of them in an installation that looked at the cinematic depiction of femininity and abjection through the figure of a great tragedian of Bollywood. Here, the distortion suited the critical inquiry, while gesturing to the popular dissemination of feminine role models.
Some years later, when I returned to the same area, these toys had been replaced by a new Chinese made device that worked on similar principles, called motion lamps. I noted the erasure of an artisanal street practice by an imported, globalized product and added these to my studio collection of these street toys. Soon another version, though larger, slightly more sophisticated, and with electronic components, called the Plasma Action TV, a low-cost facsimile of a plasma screen, replaced and supplemented the motion lamps. I dismantled these in the studio and, still intrigued by the effect created by the use of mechanically moved still images by these objects, I began to experiment and create my own version of the mechanism. Through this, I could explore a new language of photographic montage created through still and moving layers. This is what I now refer to as an animated lightbox. I make them in the studio, and over the years the combination, number of layers, and durational quality have developed and become more complex. However, they remain devices that use simple mechanical motion to create a moving image, albeit of a different kind.
These animated boxes are neither moving nor still. Through the slow repetitive looping of layered images, they create a different sort of quality of time and of attention. I have made a number of animated lightbox works over the years, and continue to enjoy the particularities of the form. The device “realigns photographic indexicality from historical trace to performative presence, dialectical in form, and cinematic in effect.” * And, most importantly, the mobile palimpsest takes on a startling dimensionality as a series of translucent and transparent layers merge in and out of each other.
10. Would you please discuss your work with satellite images of ecological disaster, which you have called “beautiful,” and your continued engagement with such beauty?
The question of beauty is a complex – one that I continue to joust with. Some of my early work has critiqued and resisted conventional ideas of female beauty – for example, a series of photographs called Notes to the Body, which images those physical aspects considered to be ugly in women – body hair, stretch marks, bellies….
Or another suite of photographs, Silver Sap that looks at the sensuality of the aging, laboring body. In these, I’m presenting a different way of looking at the beauty of women’s bodies, retrieving the female body from commodified representations. Here I think of the camera as an organ of touch, lovingly exploring the clefts, declivities, textures, marks, and sheer presence of a well lived-in body. A body that is a rich landscape of history, experience, and feelings. Perhaps I have always questioned the binary that is normally set up between what is beautiful and what is not. I believe that the two apparent opposites are bound up together – and I often find beauty in the grotesque, or vice versa.
I was thinking about landscape traditions in visual art as a prism to understand the relationship between humans and the earth through history while working on another installation. This led me from oil painting in the 16th century, assertions of ownership in EuroAmerican culture through to contemporary, glossy, hyper-real National Geographic photographs. Of course, other cultures had different expressions, emblematic of different knowledge systems and relationships.
And from there, onto looking at the most contemporary form of looking at the earth: the satellite image. An unprecedented technology of seeing without the human eye – one that is devoid of human agency, created by visual technologies tied to surveillance and military use. These images, and at a more quotidian level, Google Earth and satnav apps in our phones, present the Earth to us in a disembodied manner. While the very first images of Earth taken from the moon were met with awe and wonder, what feelings do these images create in us towards the Earth?
I began looking at NASA and other websites. While the images released to the public are manipulated to some extent, they are faithful to what the satellites record. The satellites are mostly devoted to mapping the terrain, water bodies, and atmospheric conditions on Earth, and include ecological disasters. Fires, desertification, forest cover, typhoons, etc. I was fascinated by how visually appealing these images of horrific conditions on Earth are. And how they reduce the experience of those living or suffering under those conditions to abstract swirls of color, texture, and movement. Yes, they are ‘beautiful.’
I used three of these images of ecological disasters in South Asia in a triptych of animated lightboxes, Edible Birds. The work investigates our changing relationship to the Earth through the metaphor of yogic asanas drawn from deep observation of natural phenomena, birds that are consumed and produced in industrial farms against the backdrop of these satellite images of the earthquake in Balakot, the floods in the Gangetic delta, and forest fires and drought in Myanmar.
A woman in kukkut (rooster) asana and a man in kak (crow) asana vault over islands of red-wattled, legless hens roosting in a digital image of severe drought in Myanmar produced by a NASA sensor. Each flash of red in this sumptuous eye-in-the sky vision of Southeast Asia, taken in the spring of 2005, marks a forest fire.
Translucent dead chicks glide over the erect figure of a woman in garudasana, (hybrid mythical bird). Behind her, the devastated city of Balakot gleams in yet another gorgeous image of natural disasters produced by the Earth observatory.
In the third animated lightbox, pincha mayurasana, the peacock-feather posture, curves across an exquisitely rendered aerial view of the inundated Gangetic plain. A brace of pheasants follows the arc, appearing and disappearing between the delicate tracery of rivers and tributaries.
The work reflects on a set of fluid conditions of interrelatedness: between remote sensing imagery and forms of mediation between humans and the rest of the phenomenal world. The beauty of the satellite images is interrupted and fractured by the other visual elements, both still and moving. The composite image is both beautiful and unsettling, disturbing.
The modernist rejection of beauty or pure aestheticism was in favor of art that provokes, disturbs, subverts. I feel that beauty can be worked with towards radical ends. I like to describe my practice as a politics of contemplation – beauty, affect, and intense sensorial experience are all a critical part of my artistic language.
11. Do you ever find yourself creatively ‘stuck?’ Is there something that is particularly helpful to you in overcoming this?
Often! Leaving it, thinking about something else, letting the unconscious work.
12. How much effort do you put into getting your work shown?
Showing is always interesting as one receives responses, comments, and feedback. It is also useful to look at the work in relation to the exhibition context. As, for instance, in a group show, along with other artists / photographers. Or seeing one’s work situated within broader thematics and conceptual frames.
I don’t really put much effort into getting into shows, it comes, or doesn’t, as the case may be.
13. Do you think there is a universal language that photography uses? Do you think that Indian photographers are finding that they are judged by western criteria and standards?
I believe photography is subjective, and therefore, obviously, influenced by where you are from and what influences have shaped you, not just in terms of images, but also as a person. So that distinctness, which can take time to manifest, is both individual and cultural. Given that influences are transnational, as are technologies, I would not think of Indian and Western, but perhaps of vocabularies that speak of the particularity of the photographer’s perception.
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Photograph © John Page
20 November
