The reengagement with the sublime in contemporary digital photography by representing the real of urban poverty
Art historian, designer and curator Annapurna Garimella shares her thoughts on depicting India's urban poverty in an article for the March 2012 issue of Domus India magazine. She finds parallels between the two books she refers to, and a small project that I pursued in Mulund, Bombay, as part of a workshop with German photographer Andrea Kuenzig in 2009.
I.
Katherine Boo’s much celebrated book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity (Random House, 2012) takes its title from an Italian tile advertisement she saw in Mumbai. “Beautiful Forever” promised the company and like many other middle class people, the residents of Annawadi too look forward to the day when they could lay tiles over annoyingly crumbly cement floors.
Boo came to this project because she came to India as the wife of Sunil Khilnani, the academic and writer whose work focuses on modern India. As a writer for the New Yorker, she had spent most of working career reporting stories about poverty including state-sponsored marriage workshops for the poor in the Bush era, outsourcing in Chennai and other such topics. BBF, her first full-length book, was borne out of desire to understand what was happening to people beyond all the government managed PR visits to successful women’s self-help groups. I admire Boo’s approach to writing this book and will certainly read it.
Recently, I also have been following the favorable reviews for Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (Random House, 2012), another book that draws me with the story it has to tell of male day laborers and the kind of life, work and anonymity they endure while seeking windows of freedom whenever possible. Boo and Sethi’s works are discussed at two levels by reviewers; first as creative work and second as part of an elaborate and evolving narrative on globalization and urbanization.
II.
Against the backdrop of these written narratives, I look at Vivek Muthuramalingam’s photographs of people residing on a landfill in Mulund. The photographer informed me that he made a story about people who did not necessarily work with waste (Muthuramalingam also has been working on this issue, but at a garbage dump in Bangalore) but were living on it. His capacity to create a photographic narrative was limited by what the authorities allowed him to access. The images of mothers and their children, boys fighting and playing, babies and street dogs that become pets are peaceful moments in what must be a turbulent place. In short, these people too are ordinary, in the way Boo’s and Sethi’s protagonists are. Like the writers, Muthuramalingam too appears to have prized intimacy over objectivity; all shots place him on the same level as his subjects and indicate that his artistic desire is to record, through his photography, the act of entering into a dialogue with the residents of a Mulund slum.
Images such as these are common, though often not so artful. It helps us to step back and think about the history of photography and what telling the stories of the poor has done for the medium and the visual arts as well as the poor. As photography moved from just doing the work of painting, it became a medium for creating a new sense of the real, which was not just reality, but heightened reality that captured the viewer’s attention and emotion. During the Great Depression, American photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans traveled across the country and captured images of devastating affect that the economic collapse had on people who were already at the margins. The affect of telling such stories with images transformed the medium, the visual arts in general and more importantly, made numerous people aware of lives that were physically and economically distant. Photography after the realist turn became an important technology for experiencing the sublime in the ordinary.
III.
The sublime has returned to the forefront of modern aesthetic experience, though it never really went away. When Emmanuel Kant distinguished between beauty and the sublime, he placed the former in the realm of instinct because it is tied to understanding and the latter in the realm of reason because it is a faculty of the mind rather than an experience of the senses. Later Romantic philosophers and writers, such as Victor Hugo, used the sublime to make the reader forget the self and contemplate something that was far greater, in all its imperfection. More recently, the sublime has become the threshold of our ability to conceive, to imagine. Here digital technology, such as the one Muthuramalingam uses, is the new “awesome,” the new sublime; it allows to us to see the real in ways never before imaginable (there are far more pictures than we can ever possibly conceive in our world but which represents a reality in our world) and also allows us to anticipate arriving at a point which we can never imagine.
How is the new sublime centered on technology affecting our ability to read and see the stories that Boo, Sethi and Muthuramalingam tell? For some people, like Matt Daniels of the blog Mumbai Boss, the arrival of Boo’s narrative was an occasion to check out the realness of the real in Annawadi and as he reports, in fact it is. He used the expansiveness of the digital to re-localize a narrative that traveled very far away. For some reviewers, Sethi’s novel is an occasion to think about the great Indian English novel, so to speak, as it talks itself into telling stories about people whose labour is critical to the transformations our society is undergoing but whose lives are comfortably invisible. Sethi is a regular contributor for kafila.org, a site that discusses stories that are not reported, underreported or misreported in big media. The printed book and Sethi’s writing on the blog, which covers issues as diverse as human rights in Chattisgarh and internet security, allow us to see how both networking across media and disrupting the routine sublimation of life in the digital sphere is essential to any kind of serious political art. Muthuramalingam’s work is not avant-garde in the traditional sense; his workmanlike visuals portray situations we know exist but which most of us never really know, in ways that are unselfconsciously art historical. For me, work like his is a dedicated pursuit of stories about farmers, trash and urban change made from his location and the perspective he builds in it. Disseminated on the Internet and in print media, images such as these and those made by others, asks us to keep looking, no matter where we are. Such looking does have an effect on how we choose to relate to these other Indias.
IV.
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Dr. Annapurna Garimella is a designer and an art historian who focuses on the art and architecture of India and is based in Bangalore, India. She heads Jackfruit, a research and design organization, with a specialized portfolio of design and curatorial projects for artists, museums, government and private organizations and non-profits. Jackfruit’s most recent project is Vernacular, in the Contemporary for Devi Art Foundation, New Delhi. She is also founder of Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, a not-for-profit organization that gathers resources and promotes research and teaching in art and architectural history, archaeology, crafts, design, and other related disciplines in academic and non-academic fora. She was the former Research Editor and Advisory Board Member for Marg Publications and is currently on the board of the S N School of Art and Communication, University of Hyderabad. She has written several essays on contemporary art and edited and contributed to two volumes, Shaping the Indian Modern on the work of Mulk Raj Anand and along with Bhanu Padamsee, Akbar Padamsee: Work in Language.
Andrea Kuenzig's work can be found here.