The visual impact of photography
From private portraits to public trauma, this medium stitches our stories into collective memory
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“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
— Susan Sontag, ‘On Photography’
I have a studio picture of my grandmother wearing a georgette sari, perched on the wooden wings of a chair. My grandfather is seated on a chair, his white beard cascading on his well-stitched achkan. A portrait of marital bliss, structured and constructed around the ornate chair. Bathed in sepia tones, this image ignited an interest in photography. Many of us may have memories of going to a village fair and getting photographed according to a fantasy backdrop — the Taj Mahal or the favourite hero of the times.
Digital-era smartphones and social media have turned everyone into a photographer. Instagram zombies with filtered selfies turn pictures of eating or dancing at a wedding or in a restaurant into personal billboards.
Photography, to me, has always been both reportage and art — only the balance has shifted dramatically over time. In the beginning (1830s-1940s), photography was a documentary tool. It was the first medium that could freeze reality with mechanical precision and was pressed into service as evidence, news, record-keeping: war photography, crime scenes, studio portraits of the wealthy. The idea of it being “art” was controversial.
Early sceptics dismissed it as a soulless craft, while rebels like the Pictorialists, a term attributed to a way of working where the photographer manipulated a photograph rather than simply recording it, protested against this simplified labelling. As each photograph involved intervention, the status of photography went through a shift, and it began to be recognised as a legitimate form of fine art.
Post-World War II, Henri Cartier-Bresson emphasised on capturing the “decisive moment”. Known as the father of modern photojournalism, he was one of the most influential street photographers of 20th century. He was globally recognised for his coverage of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral in 1948. His pictures became pictorial essays that elevated reportage to something poetic and subjective. The ‘decisive moment’ wasn’t just capturing reality — it was composing it.
Photography didn’t kill ‘realism’ in painting, it unchained it. Impressionists like Monet and Renoir ditched photo-perfect realism with the dictum to paint what one perceives rather than what one sees. No more portrait drudgery in stuffy studios. Canvases and easels were taken outdoors and painters captured the changing light and fleeting shadows — Van Gogh’s swirling clouds, Cezanne’s geometric mountains, Gauguin’s primal dreams.
The axiom that a picture is worth a thousand words rings true. Several iconic photographs from India’s history capture profound human pain and have become symbols of larger socio-political tragedies, highlighting issues like industrial negligence, communal violence, colonial oppression, and forced displacement. Some photographs sear themselves into our minds and heart, embodying an entire tragedy in a single frame.
Images of Partition haunt. Refugees cramped in every available space in trains along with a caravan of humanity; children and the elderly carried by their families; their scant belongings — these photographs leave an imprint far beyond the frame.
The image of a mud-caked child, the face barely visible, captured the horrors of the Bhopal gas tragedy. It became an abiding image stamped on the consciousness of the nation. Similarly, the desperate pleading of a Muslim man amid the Gujarat riots distilled the violence of this dark chapter into one unforgettable moment. These images don’t just document personal suffering but have shaped public memory and discourse around accountability, justice and reconciliation in India’s socio-political history.
My desire to write about photography stems from a recent book launch: of Prof Bhupinder Brar’s ‘Time and Transience’. It captures through a photographic narrative a ‘stillness’ and ‘waiting’ that comes from personal loss and grief. The book captures fleeting moments of human vulnerability and the raw realisation of forgotten moments. The book doesn’t merely record reality, but makes us pause, observe and connect with the extraordinary hidden silently within the everyday.
Artist Pushpamala N has also intrigued me. Known for her performative photography and video works, she frequently engages with Hindu mythology while drawing stylistic inspiration from theatrical traditions, including Parsi theatre.
She creates photographic works where she embodies both photographer and performance artiste, blurring the lines between subject and object. In her series ‘Phantom Lady’ (1996-1998), shot in Bombay, she plays a masked Zorro-like figure attempting to rescue her twin sister from the mafia. This cheekily referenced Fearless Nadia (Mary Ann Evans), the pre-Independence stunt woman, iconic for the film ‘Hunterwali’. In this 1935 film, a masked Nadia portrayed a vigilante princess seeking justice.
Pushpamala treats each frame as a meticulously crafted mise en scene, turning the static medium of photography into a dynamic intersection of theatre, performance and storytelling. Her photographs are elaborate productions: she researches, scripts, designs costumes with painted backdrops, often casting herself as the central performer. Her photographs resemble a frozen stage play.
She re-enacts or subverts mythological narratives, performing archetypal roles from epics like ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’. ‘Avega — The Passion’, a 2012 series, is a tableaux-based photo-performance exploring three female characters from the ‘Ramayana’ — Sita, Surpanakha and Kaikeyi.
Her practice overall treats photography as a theatrical stage, subverting mythological and historical tropes with wit and chutzpah. Often referred to as ‘the most entertaining iconoclast of contemporary Indian art’, she attempts to subvert the dominant discourse through her photo and video performances.
The celebrated photographer of Chandigarh, Diwan Manna, wears many hats. Beyond his lens, he has shaped the cultural landscape of Chandigarh as the artistic curator and administrator of the Lalit Kala Akademi. His work reflects his vision that gets epitomised in the truism — “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Photography, for him, rejects the passive aim-and-shoot mentality. It demands a deliberate arrangement of reality, where light, composition and intent sculpt the fleeting into the eternal.
Manna’s images hover between surrealism and spirituality, laced with an estranging whimsy that defies easy categorisation. A wild field of grass with a length of white cloth fluttering in the breeze, languid women bathed in diaphanous light; silhouette swaying across cracked walls and shadows lurking furtively blur the line between what is visible and what is imagined.
His signature negative-positive manipulations — flipping tones to merge dark and light — suggest an inner gaze turned outward in silent contemplation. These works feel haunting, sometimes ghostly, as if peering into parallel realms.
For Manna, the camera is no mere box but a mirror reflecting the multidimensional world he inhabits. It forces you to see beyond the surface, where everyday objects — discarded saris, rusted bicycles, silent benches — become portals to existential musings. His process is meditative: long exposures capture breath-like movements, while double exposures layer realities.
Photography is definitely an art form that enriches the artistic pantheon, and like the sepia portrait of my grandparents endures not as a relic, but as a genteel memory of an era gone by. From Bhopal’s anguish to Brar’s grief, Pushpamala’s myths to Manna’s quirkiness — photography stitches our stories into collective memory.
— The writer is a theatre director
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