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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Review |
What I Saw in that Light
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| Photojournalism, however serious or humanitarian the issue to which it is committed, does not magically become art when it is taken out of its journalistic context |
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Published : 1 February 2011 |
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| ‘Military Calligraphy’ by Parthiv Shah, from the Barbed
Wire and Beautiful Skies series.
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| A |
FTER I FINISHED READING, and looking at, Art as
Witness, I put it away for a while and tried to hold
the whole book in my head. I wanted to see, before
sitting down to write about it, which bits of the book came
back and remained with me most vividly or meaningfully. As
the co-editor, Sana Das, explains in her opening piece, ‘Interrupting
the Spectacle,’ in |
being made up of writing as well as photography, the book attempts to “interrupt” the verbal with the visual. The photographs are placed “in the way” of the writing, so that the reader “trips” up against the pictures and is confronted with an “abrasive, painful and less forgettable” experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that the most powerful moments—to which I kept returning, intellectually and imaginatively—were images and not opinions. Yet, oddly enough, none of these images came from the photographs; they were all in the writing.
I was riveted, for instance, by the account given by the
Kashmiri journalist, memoirist and translator, Iftikhar Gilani,
of how, as a prisoner at Tihar jail, he had to guard his
English dictionary round the clock: “its fine paper would
have been perfect for making cigarettes [prohibited in
Tihar].” “When some people donated copies of the English
translation of the Holy Qur’an,” he continues in his ‘Tales
from Tihar,’ “the jail superintendent refused to distribute
them, afraid that someone seen tearing the holy book could
spark a bloody row.” This is the stuff of art as well as a rare
sort of history—the history of interior, truly invisible, experience.
And, as unselfconsciously good writing, it is already
art, giving us access to what would otherwise have remained
unrepresented, startling us into looking at the content of
this book in a new and more difficult light. It compels us to
reflect not only upon the nature of prisons, books and cigarettes
(I was reminded of Jean Genet’s 1950 film, Un Chant
d’Amour), but also makes us think about what it means to
be free and unfree, afraid and unafraid. Our thoughts hang
together, though, around that unique image of a dictionary
being smoked away secretly in a prison.
In this book about incarceration, custodial deaths and
disappearance, the death penalty and the brutality of modern
nation-states, the jail as a scene of reading (and writing)
becomes a recurring motif. The solace, power and fragility
of books are central to perhaps the finest piece of writing
in Art as Witness: ‘May I take a book with me?’ by Kian
Tajbakhsh, the Iranian-American social scientist who has
been in and out of Tehran’s Evin prison, and is now prohibited
from leaving Iran. Tajbakhsh describes how his
“attentive reading” of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, le Carré
and Vikram Seth, among others, deeply enriched the solitude
afforded by imprisonment and led to a remarkable
change in his “perception of time.” His reflective essay–
spare, stoical and devoid of sensationalism—is in a tradition
of prison-writing that goes back to a Roman classic like
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and includes the writings
of Wilde, Nehru and Gramsci. The essay sets a high
standard for the rest of the book, not only with respect to
the writing, but also in the way the book addresses the nature
of art, and art’s relationship with powerlessness, injustice
and suffering. “Huddled in the blanket, angled to
catch the fluorescent light coming through the small barred
window of the thick metal door, I read,” writes Tajbakhsh,
providing us again with a simple, but masterful, image that
renders photographic illustration redundant.
At the other extreme from Tajbakhsh’s meditation on
reading in jail, there is another kind of visual immediacy,
the shock of a different sort of truth, in Vibhuti Narain Rai’s
recollection, translated from Hindi, of being one of the first
police officers to discover the 43 massacred Muslim men
on the night of 22 May 1987 in Hashimpura on the Delhi-
Ghaziabad border. This is an account not of reading, but
of seeing or looking in extremis—a moment frozen in time,
preceding action or activism, and shot through with a sense
of the surreal, which clutches at the languages of cinema
and of dreams when trying to express itself in words: “The
weak beams of their torches fell on the thick shrubs beside the stream but it was difficult to see anything in that dim
light. I told the drivers to turn the vehicles towards the
stream and turn their headlights on. An area of around 100
yards width was illuminated. What I saw in that light was
the nightmare I referred to earlier.”
This sounds and feels, at first, like the primal scene of witnessing,
but it is actually full of a terrible sense of belatedness.
True witnessing eludes even the first to arrive at the
scene, for that person is always already too late. The truth
of brutality and suffering—the forensic, the legal, the empirical
truth—is only recorded irretrievably on the retinas
and nerve-ends of the silent dead. Hence, the irreversible
irony of the phrase, “Art as witness.” Art can only record
the impossibility of witnessing; it represents, at best, the
abyss that separates its medium, its craft, its fictions and
its intentions from the otherness of what really happened,
from the quick—and the slow—of tragedy. Even the cleverest
league between photography and journalism, masters of
the moment, must reconcile with this belatedness, before
claiming for itself the privilege of witnessing and of having
produced art out of that privilege.
Art as Witness rhetorically acknowledges this abyss
through the sophisticated theorising of Sana Das’ (a tad too) finely
written introduction: “The problem with the photographic
image is not that it is beautiful but that it is too beautiful,
perfected as it is by technology; and its impurity for
experience lies precisely in that technological perfection.
Thus, a very Platonic question emerges: Isn’t the written
word enough? Why do we need the image?” But the following
piece by Parthiv Shah, ‘Images for Change,’ brings the
entire book, and the thinking behind its photographic approach,
down to the glibness of an all-too-familiar photojournalistic
ethos nervously waking up to the emergence of
art photography: “To reach a media-savvy audience one has
to strike the right balance; even as all the vital issues are
addressed, the way they are ‘packaged’ is crucial.” Das and
Shah seem to be writing about two different books in their respective essays—one critically disrupting precisely the
sort of media-savvy packaging that Shah is talking about
to create other ways of seeing and thinking; and the other
appropriating, almost in toto, the rhetoric of the newsmagazine
photo essay that suddenly wishes to re-invent itself as
art, in this case, simply by placing itself alongside activism
(and thereby refusing to think, with any freshness or precision,
about the meanings of either art or activism). As a
result, the first book (Das’ book) is realised only in some of
the writing, which, in turn, sets standards that the second
book (Shah’s book) never quite manages to live up to. Photojournalism,
however serious or humanitarian the issue to
which it is committed, does not magically become art when
it is taken out of its journalistic context, enlarged, expensively
printed and framed, and hung in a beautifully lit gallery;
nor does it turn into art when it accompanies political,
emotive or fine writing.
This is why it is not fair to photographers like Swapan
Nayak, Shehzad Noorani and Sohrab Hura to take the photographs
they have made, put them under the rubric of art,
subject them to an aesthetic gaze that may not have been
part of their original intention, ask “Is this Art, or is this
not Art?” and then find them either adequate or lacking.
It is, therefore, the most ordinary snapshots that become
the most moving documents in this book—a black-and-white
image of a football team of Burmese refugees outside
Calcutta’s Presidency jail, or a colour photo of the adivasi
hospital in Chhattisgarh run by Binayak Sen before he
went to prison. The more self-consciously made sequences
by Parthiv Shah or Sonia Jabbar seem to recall too much
the work of artists like Fazal Sheikh (especially in their
photograph-of-a-photograph, portrait-holding-a-portrait
victimology, reminiscent of Sheikh’s The Victor Weeps).
But they lack the fineness of technique, intellectual profundity,
depth of feeling and unconventional modes of
dissemination that one values in Sheikh’s work. His Ramadan
Moon and A Camel for the Son, made for distribution
among Dutch politicians, judges, mayors and the media, or
the poster-set, Beloved Daughters, made for ActionAid, also
happen to be exquisite works of art. Their commitment to
activism, advocacy and accessibility refuses to compromise
on technical perfectionism and conceptualist rigour. It is
for this reason that one does not hesitate, when pushed, to
call them art, and not because one takes them as ‘witnesses’
to the atrocities they try to fathom and give vicarious
access to. This is, indeed, a difficult balance to strike. The
epic melancholy of Sheikh’s art of photography, its luminous
clarity and reticence, lies in refusing to indulge in the
presumption of witnessing. Paradoxically, more than any
other medium, photography needs to be thought of more
carefully, and with greater humility, before celebrating its
access to the real thing.
Art as Witness, edited by Parthiv Shah and Sana Das
(Tulika Books, Rs 950)
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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RK
1 March 2011
03:02 PM
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Magnificent!
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