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Festival Review

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Gautham Ramachandran
reviews
Indian Photography Festival 2018
Also, an exclusive
Editorial by Abul Kalam Azad
Read Part 2 of the
review here

Indian Photo Festival 2018 Review.
An Exhibit at IPF 2018

Indian Photo Festivals

Business As Usual Part I

Rencontres d’Arles is the first photography festival that I saw. I was living, working as well as pursuing my higher studies in photography in France and England, between 1994 and ’96, and every summer, I would keenly watch the entire Arles province getting ready to host the annual festival. The ripple effect of the festive mood could be felt all over South France. Photographers from around the nation would get excited,  and look forward to the gathering and sharing that was to take place. It had many interesting catalogs and print documents, which were informative and produced very well. The high quality prints exhibited were made by the photographers themselves, carrying their individual signature.

Rencontres d’Arles was founded in the ‘70s by Arles photographer Lucien Clergue, writer Michel Tournier and historian Jean-Maurice Rouquette. The trio had the necessary ingredients to historically place the medium of photography, and appropriately present photographers of their time. By its 25th and 26th edition, the ones I had seen, the festival had established itself as an important avenue for photography and photo-enthusiasts and its important components were well defined. They had an interesting mix in their representation – it would have a larger representation from their own region and country, and then a diversified mix of International photographers who were mostly part of the avant-garde art movement. It was a platform for all – established as well as upcoming photographers, who followed diversified styles, philosophies and thoughts. Experts with opposing opinions could share the same platform, and question and criticize one another, leading to an enriching experience. It was what its name stands for – Rencontres, meaning “meeting”, of photographers.

Since then, I have seen quite a few festivals from around the world, and some of them stand out in terms of its content and/or presentation. Worldwide, there are quite a few prominent photo-festivals that have influenced photography in different ways, but the sheer volume of work being produced means that such festivals are more like an industry than art exhibitions. In India, photography festivals are relatively new. It started with Delhi Photo Festival in 2011, followed by Indian Photography Festival in 2015 and Chennai Photo Biennale that started in 2016. These events are unfolding at the same time when Kerala hosts one of the major art events from the country, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which also showcases photography in a large way.

To begin with, there is a constraint in the naming itself; all of these are regional and sectarian – continuing on a colonial understanding that photography is a medium that could promote a place as a destination. Coupled with this is the global trend of establishing photography and art festivals as a means to promote tourism, a response to the collapsing art market. There is then the matter of what the Indian identity is, India being a country of vast dimensions and subcultures. Any festival attempting to be national must grapple with this issue of what is to be included, and by corollary, what is to be excluded. Just like the general bias of Indian photography being towards a few photojournalistic giants, more often than not, the festivals also highlight photo-journalistic and documentary works. The medium of photography has tremendous potential, and has had several innovative practices. Its applications have ranged from illustrating or representing natural forms to creating abstract images, and its impact has changed the study of natural sciences and humanities alike. Photography can readily lend itself to other disciplines or art practices, and has given rise to a wide of range of collaborative art works. Giving priority to only those images that are commissioned and/or printed in a magazine/daily is in no way beneficial to the medium. This will only make it seem as if the possibilities of photography are as narrow as what is represented in such publications, and in venues which promote such representations.

There is a general misconception in the understanding of genres of photography, more so about its history and contributors in Indian context. They are broadly divided into four categories – colonial photographers, the stalwarts of Post-Independence photojournalism, a set of photographers that galleries and other art collectors had invested during the market boom, and finally, those who follow the already accepted styles (indirectly supporting the tycoons). In this itself, of late, divisions such as gay photography, feminist photography, etc. have arisen. All these photographers and concepts have and continue to appeal to the western audience and their funding, while there have been quite a few not-so-popular native and foreign photographers even during the colonial times, who made significant contribution to the medium. Apart from Deen Dayal, Felice Beato and Bourne & Shepherd, where are the others – Ram Singh II, Zachariah D’Cruz, Linnaeus Tripe?

The same continues even now, while India has quite a few independent, innovative and original photographers – who are constantly kept in the sideline, forever. Even in the photojournalism genre, the presentation is not comprehensive and only a few like Raghu Rai or Pablo Bartholomew and other such photographers who have the backing of a legacy or a western organization such as the Magnum are promoted. During my brief but intense period as a photojournalist, when I lived and worked in Delhi for almost a decade, I had come across many interesting photo-journalists. Where are the works of Prashant Panjiar, Bhawan Singh, T Narayanan, Praveen Jain and the likes? It circles back to the same point, antique value attributed to colonial photographers who were celebrated during their own times and recognized by the Empire; and contemporary photographers who are supported by the galleries, media and government. The investment made needs return, obviously. But it doesn’t add any value to the medium as such.

The focus of these festivals also seems to be quantity, of how truly international it is with the number of countries being represented. It is only creating a market for International photographers in India, while many senior Indian photographers who have done significant contribution go unnoticed. Here, the role of galleries and corporates is also quite high, promoting their respective photographers/artists. On top of it is the role of International cultural organizations, which have their own respective agendas and photographers to be promoted.

Another reason for the burgeoning of festivals is that photography is the most economical art form, and can be easily replicated. It has become a cheap way of producing art objects, and is being relied on because the art market has literally placed galleries and art collectors in a fix. In effect, it reduces the medium’s value. Cheaper commercial prints, often mass produced by the organizers themselves, do not carry the individual photographers’ identity.  Neither its size or presentation format is as the photographer had originally conceived.

The involvement of the public is also only at the level of a visitor, and oftentimes, they are not an informed audience who understand the nuances of photography and its representation. In an effort to reach out, without actually gaining their prolonged interest, the organizers show a desperation that is becoming increasingly counterproductive. The Rencontres festival, for example, had influenced and attracted public ownership to an extent that, in 2015, their €6.3-million budget was put together through public funding which accounted for 40%, sales (mainly of tickets and derivative products) for 40%, and private partnerships only 20%.

The success of the photo-festival relies largely in the manner in which it is conceived, in its historical placement of the medium and its practitioners and the aesthetic, artistic and effective way in which they are arranged for viewing. In my opinion, none of the festivals organized so far have fared well. However, it is only a beginning and probably, there will be changes in the coming ones. It is with this in mind that we are presenting a series of reviews of the ongoing Indian Photography Festival 2018.

The Editor

What is so ‘Indian’ about Indian Photography Festival?

People are interested in photography, but do not know where to start… A photography festival gives them a place to explore these possibilities”, says Aquin Mathews, Director of the Indian Photography Festival. Now in its fourth edition, the Indian Photography Festival (IPF), is growing dramatically in scale – featuring 550 photographers from 52 nations, 50 and 12 more (respectively), from its previous edition. The current edition opened on September 6th in the State Art Gallery in Madhapur, Hyderabad. The show features 25 solo-exhibits, 10 group exhibits (of which 4 are awards), 16 digital exhibitions that present 1100+ images (in print, or digital form), and additionally hosting 8 one-off slideshow presentations and various artist talks/workshops, all spread out over 12 locations in the city, over the course of 1 month.

In the digital age, such spaces of limited exploration/exposition – I say limited, because of a photography festival’s primary focus of exhibiting artworks created using a specific medium, in a time when such puritanism has little to no merit on its own, and further that the featured works are almost exclusively shot in digital SLR cameras, and printed digitally – are becoming more and more redundant. Photography, today, is a super-saturated medium, thanks to the boom of  the smartphone, and the relatively cheap technology of digital cameras. And with the additional freedom of not needing to worry about material wastage and exposure correction, as was the case with film technology, photographers today have the luxury of shooting thousands of images with much lesser effort and risk. Online magazines dedicated to photography, and mobile apps specifically designed to create, edit and share smartphone photography are a dime-a-dozen. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook provide much more comprehensive/wider and easily accessible portfolios of photographic images. So, what does a photography festival have to offer, that an average person has no access to?

An argument can be made with regards to how an exhibition is a cultural/social event, as opposed to the isolation of the viewer on online platforms. This creates a space for nurturing a culture of viewership as a collective and informing the public of the prevalent visual aesthetics of the times. This social side of exhibitions is what contemporary art festivals are based on, first and foremost. Festivals are spaces for like-minded people to come together; this applies not just to art festivals, but for all festivals. Art festivals, specifically, can be said to be the celebratory gatherings of the new crowd of art enthusiasts who have the tastes of a neoliberal society.

Photography is ultimately a print – and the trouble with the virtual world of digital photography is that the image is slightly different for each viewer on different platforms. As advanced as digital and internet technology has become, it’s still not the same as an exhibition of prints – the same way that an online image of a painting is still not the same as the real one. A photography festival can indeed offer you this opportunity to view the medium in this format. IPF’s issue, as with most exhibitions, biennales, festivals, and fairs, is that it fails to understand the qualities and boundaries of the format. This is especially evident in the enlarged prints of Nick Ut’s Vietnam War photographs (the mass delusion that a film negative has infinite resolution is simply that – a delusion), the prints of which inevitably look broken and grainy, with no scope to actually extract details to such an extent anyway.

Curation is an important aspect of contemporary art exhibitions. A curatorial theme that would tie up, and interlink the several individual narratives, to an underlying vision is something that is again mostly unseen on online platforms (more recently, individuals have made efforts in ‘curating’ online archives – based on simple but particular themes). IPF deliberately avoids working with curators, preferring to select photographers through an open call, which is then scrutinized by a jury. The selection process for this edition of IPF was overseen by a jury consisting of photographers and editors like Sudharak Olwe, Reza Deghati, Deepak John Mathew, Mags King, Alison Zavos etc. The selected exhibits are not confined to any specific genre of photography.

This is not to say that the fest operates without any amount of curation – a major point of focus seems to be women. The IPF’s decision to include female photographers in almost equal numbers to male photographers can be seen as a positive step – with a considerable section of the exhibits themselves featuring women as subjects. That’s about all that we can take home from this – the images in question have fallen into all sorts of clichés and stereotypes of the Feminist discourse. Take for example, the photographs of Prabhakar Kusuma, Benedicte Desrus, Sara Bennett, where the women are painted as an “oppressed”/“helpless” class, and on the flip side, the images of men portray them as “violent” and “oppressors”, as and when they appear (Antonio Aragon Rununcio, Gabriel Scarlett, Gilles Clarke, Mark Edward Harris).



These characteristics are reflected throughout the festival’s exhibits – be it the depiction of the Bathukamma festival as some ‘exotic ritual’ by a Canadian and a Japanese photographer (“cleverly” bringing together a photographer from the ‘far’ west and another from the ‘far’ east), or the photojournalistic images of North Korea and the war in Yemen produced by American photographers, the priority seems to be a sympathetic depiction of the issues (rather than a critical examination, and dissemination of the same). Bathukamma, declared as the state festival of Telangana (along with Bonalu), has been receiving huge fundings from the state government. Undoubtedly an old autumn-harvest festival, celebrating the fertile lands – as evidenced by the two root words that make up its name “Bathuku” (life) and “Amma” (mother), and the focus on flowers (similar to “Onam” in the state of Kerala and Pongal in Tamil Nadu) – Bathukamma has taken on several different personas in the recent past: as a celebration of kinship among women, as a state-funded festival imbued with the spirit of Telugu identity, as (an appropriated) variation of the Hindu festival of ‘Sharada Navaratri’, and a symbol of cultural legacy. The two photographers have avoided exploring these significant facets of the festival, which has created strong cultural markers in the collective psyche, and instead mostly showcase it as a female-centric ritual and a time for women to simply just let their hair down (It is conceivable that the photographers were not looking to depict such nuances, but were simply looking for images that were related to the subject of ‘femininity’ in a broad sense). The only distinguishing characteristic between the two sets of images is the Japanese photographer’s use of a flash. The trouble with such ‘clever’ commissions is that the photographers involved have very limited knowledge of the sociological and cultural significance of such traditions, and the evolution of this significance over time, and they run the risk of ending up producing amateurish travelogues (like the gazillion travel photographs on platforms like Instagram) that look exactly the same.

American Photojournalism in all its glory can be seen in the latter two exhibits – the photographs of the bleak conditions and the brutality of civil war serving as justifications for past, present, and future interventions, either directly or indirectly. It falls just short of an appeal to the benevolent empire that delivers Providence. The impacts of former western interventions that precipitated these conditions (directly or indirectly) are conveniently forgotten, with no examination of the underlying cause of these situations. The idea of ‘Barbarians’ stretches as far back as Classical era Greeks – where the people who speak a different tongue, or more precisely those who spoke improper Greek, and follow different traditions, were alienated as simpletons. This developed into a stereotype during the Hellenistic period that thought of such people as having a child-like intellect – unable to talk or reason properly, cruel, unable to govern themselves being some of the key characteristics of how they were portrayed. This archetype can be seen reflected in the colonial empires’ attitude towards all of its colonies. After the Great War ended, the middle east was ‘liberated’ from the Ottoman Empire and carved up into ‘mandates’ to be governed by European powers to ‘protect the natives from the Modern world’ – and after the end of World War II, the mandates were left to fend for themselves with the UN declaring that the newly formed nations should operate with the borders drawn by European kingdoms. These histories are never examined in tandem with the current instabilities in the middle-east, the blame laid solely on religious terrorism/dictatorships that have taken over the region. Photojournalism has had a history of misrepresentation since its apparent inception by Felice Beato – who is infamously believed to have rearranged corpses to lend more gore to his images. It’s heartening to see that the genre has kept the tradition of projecting half-truths alive, only the appeals are to an Empire of a different kind.



Not to be left behind, the ‘Indian’ part of IPF peddles the same narratives that were used by the colonial empire – that of a beautiful land worthy of investment, and that of a people still struggling with modernity – albeit this time the narration is partially to itself, specifically to the modernized urban class. The colonial archives were tailored to appeal to the British investors, merely illustrating a narrative of an exotic land – wealthy, and untarnished by the din of industrialization – and to the Royal Crown as another narrative – of its responsibility to uplift the population (the archetype of Barbarians, again). Be it travel photographs of Hyderabad or the rural portraits of the ‘common-man’, they all appear in magazines and publications that cater to urban tastes, and by extension, western tastes as well – serving the same purposes as 100 years ago. Curiously, almost all of South India is absent from any sort of representation in the festival.

The element of narration is alien to a photographic image primarily, and particularly, due its limitation in being an arrested moment – it’s a description of whatever is happening in front of the camera. This structuring is more or less imposed on photography by putting multiple images in relation to each other to produce an ‘illusion’ of a narrative. Narratives offer a flow of events or time, into which any given image can be placed; and the image itself then becomes a symbol for that narrative, and even conjures that narrative in the minds of the viewers by itself. The images produced by and of women can be viewed through the lens of populism – given the current political climate; and the already superficial renderings of these issues also do not take the audience into consideration in their attempt to communicate with them. The focus seems to be only on the production of such a ‘narrative’, and not in its significance, or clarity – an emphasis on the niche labour market that can produce such images (i.e women). This is not to be understood as a sweeping statement to undermine women photographers, but an explanation of the “category” of female photography. The medium of photography does not exclude females from its purview, since the digital technology (like most technology today) of cameras that only require a few buttons to be pressed to produce an image doesn’t really provide any arguments as to why any photographs taken by a female photographer would be any different from that of a male photographer. The images exhibited conform to this notion, having minimal to no differences between the images made by males and those by females.



Commissioned portraits have found their way into the galleries as well – an inevitable consequence of postmodernism (we have to assume), where textualization of anything renders them as legitimate artistic interventions, even retroactively. The magazine portraits evoking the same aura of court-commissioned paintings of the nobility during the Renaissance (their modern day counterparts appearing no less staged or theatrical in nature), as well as the photographs of wedding shenanigans and festivities, which quite often aspire to the level of theatre exuded by the above mentioned ‘nobility’ in their professions, have muscled their way into contemporary Indian photography.

Now we can see a broad, but clear pattern emerging in the ‘curation’ of the exhibition – the images all appeal to the urbanized audience (a product of globalisation) of a metropolis, as mythologies. Whether it be the discussion of women’s issues, where the images create a dichotomy of female oppression and male violence, or celebrity portraits that ‘narrate’ their personas, or landscapes that more or less resemble dreams (covertly or overtly) of a man who is trapped in a monotonous world. These mythologies are built using the images that evoke pre-existing archetypes that do not question the legitimacy of the discourse. As Roland Barthes explains, to read a picture as a symbol is to renounce its reality as a picture; if the ideology of the myth is obvious, then it does not work as myth. On the contrary, for the myth to work as myth it must seem entirely natural, devoid of layers, and releasing the viewer from any obligation to decipher or unravel it. The very function of myth, as proposed by Barthes, is to naturalize a concept, a belief – it doesn’t burden itself with the intention of showing or concealing truths, rather it only endeavours to deviate from reality. Here both myth and narrative participate in the propagation of ideologies – first by deviating from the reality, through repurposing signs and motifs that are linked to recognizable archetypes, and then by re-introducing them in specific contexts that would imply another story.  



The nature of the photographic image lends itself to the production of such mythologies, due to its faux-reputation as a recorder of reality ( even as this nature has been subjected to scrutiny by various photographers, through their work, over the last century), when in fact it records whatever action unfolds in front of it. This is why a photograph can confidently propose a narrative about a civil war, while simultaneously pointing out the absurdity of it being able to propose any narrative (Gao Peng’s ‘Illusions’). The key here is to understand that the contents of the images have far lesser influence than the way it is presented – both the war and illusion are presented as a straightforward image that requires no ‘decoding’ for the viewer to understand. As Susan Sontag explains in her essay, In Plato’s CavePhotography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But, this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say “There is the surface. Now think what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way”.



The Ideal of Art was realized in the Classical era of Greece, even as the society of the time can never be held to the same standards. Although society progressed, this early peak of art could never be surpassed, nor re-created to perfection. This in turn led to art – as a true representation of human nature – being debased into mere ‘production’ aimed to re-capture this ideal. ‘Art’ is then repurposed as a tool to point to a previous era (albeit not through exposition of facts, but through production of myths), where these ideals (more accurately, archetypes) existed. It propagates the notion of ‘golden days gone by’, feeding off of the society’s perpetual alienation from its changing surroundings. This becomes evident in the examination of production of artworks under various Art movements in history (with few exceptions), patronised by the Kings and institutions that sought to control its population.

The images selected for the 4 awards featured in the festival serve to reinforce this uncomplicated production of a fantasy (as myth) – that exist only as a means to mobilize capital, through its marketing to an increasingly disillusioned urban crowd that yearns for such fantasticality. Which underlines a very important point – it’s quite pointless to place expectations on grand festivals to create spaces for social change through art. On the other hand, it can be viewed from a distance to gain a better perspective of the nature of contemporary visual culture.

Gautham Ramachandran

Gautham Ramachandran is an upcoming artist who works with Photography, Printmaking, and Painting. He is a graduate of The Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thrissur where he received his degree in Painting, and completed his Masters in Printmaking from the SN School of Arts and Communication, Hyderabad.



Published on September 25, 2018

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