Portrait photography is one of the areas where Raghu Rai has displayed mastery, and where he has revealed his own deepest convictions about the medium. Photomail investigates photographs of four spiritual and political leaders made by Raghu Rai, seeking to find what patterns run beneath the surfaces of these images.

Alessio Mamo’s series of photographs titled ‘Dreaming Food’ was shot in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in 2011, in which he tried to illustrate the contrast in the manner food was wasted in the West “especially at Christmas time”, and the widespread poverty that he saw in parts of India. The series was exhibited in Delhi Photography Festival in 2013, but when he posted images from the series during his takeover of World Press Photo’s Instagram handle as one of its awardees of 2018, a public debate erupted around the nature of his work and its political correctness. WPP has since issued a statement in which it clarifies the guidelines for its Instagram takeover, which is a benefit given to its award winners. But Indian print and online media subsequently took up the issue and it has been given wide coverage, with experts, photographers, and commentators weighing in from all sides. Now that all the arguments for and against have been brought out, PhotoMail takes a look at this issue in the broader context of poverty representation in India.

Does a photo carry a meaning? Like a memory which has a meaning, photo doesn’t in itself have a meaning. Stills don’t speak but they are not dead as such. They evoke memories and memory evokes the meaning behind the image. - NL Balakrishnan

The realist discourse of photography believes that photographs capture the world as it is. As scientific, empirical knowledge. It is the Camera’s mechanical nature, which is supposed to give us the unchallenged, unassailable ‘reality’ of photography. It presents us with the image of photography as a mechanized form of perception. 

For about half its life, the Indian film industry has been dominated by Bollywood, at least in terms of presence in society, popularity and scale of productions. Bombay took over as the major center of film production in India from Calcutta, and gave birth to the Bollywood – the name itself is a clear homage to the ideal it aspired to. Bollywood has since dictated the imagination of the majority of the middle class of the country, directly and indirectly; and in this aspect, the presence of the still photographer in the set is often underestimated.

The idea of ‘documentary’ goes to the heart of the invention of photography. Historically distinct from painting, the iconic-index-symbol structure of photographs quickly impressed with its capacity to ‘document’ things, a function which today, in an age of photo-copiers and electronic machines that reproduce instantly, is so obvious that it seems banal to even mention it here.

This series of Vineyard workers started taking shape when photographer Anila joined the team of grape-pickers of her neighbour and friend winemaker Pascal Potaire (Les Capriades) in September 2013. She had recently settled in the country side of Central France and, after months spent indoors, she felt exhilarated by the contact with nature in the Vineyard. She had to be up early and start the hard physical labour, which had rhythmic stretch, bend, stretch and bend movements... the feet and hand touching the soil. The amazing body and mind energy it created, as well as the bounding between the members of this motley crew of various marginal backgrounds, inspired Anila to capture and document the synergy. As she was also working, the remaining moments for the photographic project were left to the poses. Thus, after progressing slowly and painfully between the ranks, the relieved standing pauses of the Vineyard workers. A global village of grounded, yet often uprooted workers has come into light, as she learned that the vines, in their wild form, are not meant to creep on the ground but to grow free and entangled, in the forests and jungles.

Even when a photograph looks unmediated, without human intervention in the realisation of its image and hence signifying authorial absence, the absence itself is a construction. It is a construction at the interface between factuality and artifice or between simulacrum and point of view; and it is not an empirically given precondition of perception. In many of Ramu’s images, as in the Calgary pictures, the rigorously composed optic array within the frame and the randomness which it suggests of the physical disarray outside the frame (both of which are bound by a causal symmetry) create a subtle dualism.

Anup Mathew Thomas gives a sense of non-commitment as he does not intent to divulge the personal narratives of these nurses. This series, in a sense stands opposite to what Parthiv Shah had done in his path breaking project titled ‘Figures, Facts, Feelings: Direct Diasporic Dialogue’ (2000). In this project, Parthiv had approached around thirty four Indian people who had settled in the UK for more than three decades. He asked them twenty questions pertaining to their lives. The answers were juxtaposed with the images of these people taken by Parthiv in the locations that they liked most in their habitats.