In order to ‘give a meaning’ to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what he [or she] frames... The secret is to take your time.... Then, however, you must be very quick. So, if you miss the picture, you’ve missed it. So what?
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
When Cartier-Bresson, several decades ago, was theorising his practice, he believed it was imperative to go between instantaneity and introspection; and the image captured was both incisive and fleeting. These co-constitutive elements were to be deployed and felt in that brief interlude between observation and then mirroring or refracting the world through the lens.
A recent Zoom interaction, which I had moderated, discussed the evolution of digital anthropology, the virtual strategies of relay, or even ways of archiving performances, in order to renew an engagement with ‘selfhood’ and with personal expression. It made me consider how in the midst of situations beyond our control this year, and indeed many intensified events flared by political persuasion, image-makers as well as viewers seemed to have subconsciously grasped Cartier-Bresson’s sense of a paradigm shift through a long, sustained pause.
2021 will mark 195 years of the invention of the photograph (a heliograph) in 1826 in France. With almost two centuries of a heterogenous cultural history behind us, last year specifically has seen image production become a pervasive yet haunting medium, much like a crystal ball illuminating aspects of our future inter-personal engagements. A new relationship has been forged between the world and people in isolation, and this phenomenon has pushed creative agents to transform the unfamiliar, the abstract and the ephemeral into the tangible. In this ‘post-digital’ moment, images of our lives may well have become trans-temporal — funnelling a resilient innovativeness around the idea of identity.
Muvindu Benoy THISKNEELAND, 2020
In the months just before the lockdown, I walked through an exhibition in Paris of Claudia Andujar, the Swiss artist who dedicated her life to representing Brazil’s Yanomami people. Her iconic images disclosed some reorienting truths about how communities and even spaces have guided new ways of being recognised by the person behind the lens. So much of 2020 was about an engagement with ‘absence’ and the ways in which we were forced to recognise how we must address our own and others’ vulnerabilities.
Shan Bhattacharya, from the book, Portal (SSAF and Tulika, 2020) Scans of damaged 110 strips of colour negatives found kept in a paper sleeve inside Achintya Bose’s studio, presumably obtained from author Riley Nash.
I recently came upon photographer Shan Bhattacharya’s fictional archive in his book Portal, where he reanimates the lives of invented characters, immersing the viewer in his memorabilia-saturated story of a lost archive, a doubtful identity, and the fading of photography studios in the city. He shows us how making something visible comes from a recognition of absence, urging us to be aware of presence. In an inverse way, through his interest in facial recognition and even surveillance, the narrative also suggests how seeing or being observed at all times can make us dangerously open to constant scrutiny, and how images can hence serve ends beyond the determination of the author.
Lockdown memories
Ishan Tankha, May 2020 A man dressed as ‘Covid 19’, as part of a Delhi Police initiative to raise awareness, ‘scares’ a couple on a cycle.
Ishan Tankha, April 2020 An empty box placed in a social distancing circle keeps place in a line at a food distribution centre.
Negotiating the dynamics of seeing, looking, and being watched, other works made in the past year come to mind with razor-sharp intensity, such as Ishan Tankha’s extensive recording of the lockdown in the capital — the mass migrations, the absence of transport, the growing poverty — contrasting it with the year before. His work is essential not just for remembering 2020 and its socio-political catalysations. Here, he poignantly composes them as diptychs, triggering comparison and hindsight. It also makes us aware that as the narrative of the recent past unfolds, the present must always make room for new images to activate memories of the past.
In another vein, artists also speculated on the imaginary potential of the documentary. Take, for instance, the series titled ‘Shared Solitude’ by Imran Kokiloo and Anita Khemka, made during the lockdown. One image, which visualises the photographer within the frame using a mirror, speaks to the contingencies of authorship, and of an attempt to make the public space both intimate and domestic. Such images present an intermixing of subjective and objective reality, dealing with a self-conscious practice that creatively visualises how being cordoned off from the world can trigger a revisionist stance in an era of a new kind of person-to-person engagement. This perspective is more explicit in the recent work of Muvindu Binoy from Sri Lanka, whose ironical commentary includes the rise of racial tensions in the U.S.
Indu Antony, from her book, Why cant bras have buttons?, 2020 I got stamped ‘Faggot’ and entered Berghain. My life has never been the same after that.
As a consequence, we have seen entanglements of memory and reality; the tension in lived and imagined spaces; the bridging of disciplinary realms and personal outlooks, all asking us to review the recent past and find lyricism in the harsh reality. To question inner and outer lives, to see the change in us, and sometimes migrate across both realms to evolve and survive. The recent self-published work by Indu Antony, titled Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons, opens such a channel, each page carrying a photographed object, with a strand of hair positioning it, while the overleaf has an anecdotal account. She speaks of the “social life of objects”, being inspired by the writings of Arjun Appadurai and Frances Yeats’ The Art of Memory (1966). For her, these are sentient articles of the everyday, much like memory cases, or ormapetti as described in Malayalam. Like Antony, others have turned the lens into personal testimonies, seen in so many Instagram accounts — the self-portraits of schmoooochita, the urbanity of banerjee.anurag, or the assemblages of aditya_dutta, among others.
Moment of pause
Collectively, their work can be read as a provocation to think about how we engender objects or spaces and consider their complicated, imperfect and contingent legacies, so as to question what should survive this moment of pause, a moment that takes us back to pre-lockdown, when there was a mass mobilisation in contrast to the forced immobility. The moment forces us to take stock of life, of livelihoods and, with reference to ongoing protests, the necessity to execute laws based on dialogue and popular consent rather than indiscriminate assertion.
Perhaps some answers about ‘revisiting the present’ lie in seeing this moment as an afterlife of the recent past, an invisible yet imperative call to make us react. Even as ongoing populist stances intensify, and even as a collective consciousness erupts across the globe, perhaps we can reconsider our allegiances and entitlements, not only as subjects being framed, but as ‘makers’ staking a claim through our personal and social lives. The transition into 2021 compels us again to make absences visible — a belief that answers may lie in the fragile, insistent slippages between acts in reality and in modes of representation.
I end with the words of Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani:
I sweep away the beginning of things and with a new language/ that has the music of water the message of fire/ I light the coming age/ and stop time in your eyes/ and wipe away the line/ that separates/ time from this single moment.
The writer is Curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and Founding Editor, PIX.