Photography, Art and Photographic Art

Notes on a Troubled Relationship

By Arjun

I am presently standing at Thampanoor, outside the Thiruvananthapuram railway station. A bridge on my right leads to Valiyasalai, the route to Neyyatinkara. At the end of the road to my left is the Overbridge Junction. Turn left here and you reach Kizhakkekotta. These two places — Valiyasalai and Kizhakkekotta — were historically connected to the Kowdiyar Palace by two prominent roads. These roads, both of which end at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple, have historically been two of the most important roads in the city. Today, a national highway runs straight from Kowdiyar via Vellayampalam to the south, continuing after Valiyasalai to Kanthalur. Another path turns from Vellayampalam, leading up to Kizhakkekotta via Palayam, passing near the Kanakakunnu Palace. Kizhakkekotta is separated from Kanthalur by the famous Chalai market, which today lies behind the Thampanoor railway station. In the past, these were royal roads; that is why they are much larger than the average urban roads we see elsewhere in Kerala.

The paradoxical changes that took place in the ruling class when Travancore merged with India can be traced along these routes. Saving the fall from prominence of the Kowdiyar palace in the administrative scheme of things, there isn’t much change in the way power is organised in this region. The present Chief Minister’s residence was converted from the erstwhile Dewan’s residence, and the Secretariat continues as a link between Travancore and Kerala. Politicians in Malabar have long complained about this identity between Travancore’s and Kerala’s administrative structure. While the retention of these buildings may symbolise the continuity between the two regimes for a Malabarite; to a Travancore resident, these same lanes are a reminder of how much the world has changed. Once reserved for the King’s chariot and entourage, these roads are now bustling with cars and bikes every weekday. Both sides of the road are lined with banks, fashion brands, restaurants, household consumable shops and electronics outlets.

An early 20th-century South Indian photographer, Zachariah D’Cruz, once took a photograph of the king’s chariot standing in front of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple at the end of this road. This photograph is notable in many ways. Technologically, it was one of the most advanced photographs of its time. It is an albumen print, which uses egg white as its main ingredient. This technique significantly improved the quality of early photographs and was implemented in India after a delay, as it was found to be difficult to adapt it to the climatic conditions here. Besides the technology, the content of this photograph was also timely, exhibiting the self-perception of the then-royal family and the Travancore government. It is a ‘posed’ photo. The Padmanabhaswamy Temple stands in the background, and the photograph is slightly reminiscent of a tourist family’s awkward gathering in front of a monument. The main subjects of the photograph are the chariot and the attendants. A few one or two-story buildings can be seen between the chariot and the temple. The sky covers about half of the photograph.

This photograph, which represented the blueblooded pride of Travancore, was among many similar views of Travancore which were presented to a British officer as a souvenir. It is now part of a collection in the British Library. It was not considered a work of art but rather a collectible — a gift. Today, we can retrospectively see it as art, something that perfectly represents a world that once existed. The contradictions of that world are also reflected in the photograph; the conception of luxury embedded in it seems ridiculous to us today. That small temple and the pitiful image of a vain king surrounded by a band of his servile subjects evoke a chuckle rather than reverence.

At the end of the 20th century, the Belgian photographer Harry Gruyaert took a photograph of what must have been the Overbridge Junction on the same road. It was the time of the CPM party congress in Thiruvananthapuram. A large portrait of Lenin, raised in connection with the congress, fills Gruyaert’s photograph. This photograph is a striking contrast to D’Cruz’s. On one side, a KSRTC bus passes by, and a bicycle moves along with other vehicles. In the background, a couple on a bike zoom past, a policeman directs traffic, and another policeman strolls by. The photograph is filled with faces — some on actual humans, many on the posters plastered on the walls everywhere. The ground cannot be seen. There is no indication that people and objects feel firmly grounded. It is a world where people rush; nothing is static. The small piece of sky visible in the upper left corner is muddy. From Lenin’s flank, the doves of peace fly out — they seem headed towards a building, not the sky. The modern industrial world has conquered the expanse of the sky. It is the idea of ​​Lenin that demands attention, not king Lenin.

D’Cruz’s photograph and Gruyaert’s photograph not only document two changed worlds but also represent two different photographies. D’Cruz’s world was a “painterly” one, where painting was the appropriate medium for its ideas. Hence, the images of Ravi Varma and Rama Varma are symbols of the dominant culture of this time, enjoyed by a small royalty and aristocracy. How these images, which related only to an enriched minority, spread and became popular through printing has been extensively discussed. However, our interest here is not in Ravi Varma’s paintings but in the photographs hidden within them.

Ravi Varma, like many Western oil painters, used photographs as references, including those taken by Zachariah D’Cruz. He often had his models photographed first and then made his paintings based on the photographs. For instance, Ravi Varma created a painting based on D’Cruz’s photograph of the Gregorios of Parumala, or the Parumala Thirumeni, who is considered the first saint of Indian origin. Today, it is Ravi Varma’s painting and its imitations, not D’Cruz’s photo, that is most popular among Kerala’s Orthodox Syrian Christians. Parumala Thirumeni’s photograph could not capture his importance during his lifetime — only a painting could fulfil that role. Reality itself was so “painterly” that it necessitated first taking a photograph and then turning it into a painting. Photography could only be a tool to aid Ravi Varma in creating his historic paintings. On the other hand, Gruyaert’s photography can be described as distinctly photographic. In Gruyaert’s world, people flit into appearance and out. His photographs have no vanishing point of perspective to direct the viewer’s attention. Instead, events in the photograph unfold on several flat planes. Just as Édouard Manet’s painting ‘The Bath’ became part of modernist art through its pastiche nature, Gruyaert’s world operates in the realm of collage. While pastiche involves combining several styles to create a new one, a collage is about merging several images into one. Photography ultimately works in the world of collage, where each photograph records the background, subject, and other objects coming together for a moment.

II

But for us, photography is no longer just a tool. While photographs do not always become works of art—we do not consider passport photos to be art, for example—even those photographs which are functional can become art in certain contexts. The contemporary German artist Max Siedentopf has a series that focuses on passport photos. Normally, a passport photograph is simply a device to identify a person. Siedentopf, however, demonstrates that not only can photography be both a tool and an art, but even the same photo can be both a tool and a work of art. Siedentopf’s work recalls a distinction made by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger between instruments and artworks. Simply put, for him, the purpose of an instrument is its function, while the purpose of an artwork is to reveal truth. Heidegger believes that truth emerges from the friction between the work of art and the world around it. The work of art has no inherent ‘truth’ apart from what is produced through this friction. Further, he distinguishes the work of art from the ‘art object’—the work of art exists along with us in the organic world, while the art object is a relic from a past world. When past worlds die, they leave objects which enter our museums and become art objects. In contrast, the work of art signals to a world that is alive around us; and is in constant dialogue with this world. Zachariah D’Cruz’s photograph is such an art object, while Gruyaert’s is a work of art.

On the contrary, there are man-made objects that never become art. These objects have nothing meaningful to do with our world or have purely functional purposes within it. Art thus has two boundaries to itself on two sides — there are things in the world that never become art, and there is art that outlives its artistic purpose. Photographs overwhelmingly belong to the first category. The majority of the photographs ever created in history were made to fulfil specific functions, often aimed at recording and replicating likenesses. In some rare instances, intentionally or unintentionally, photography reveals truth. From that moment, and only then, does it become a work of art. Take a family album, for example. The pictures in it are made to remember family members and shared moments. They become works of art only when the images are ripped out of context and laid in service of a larger or an altogether different story. Until then, they remain mere tools.

The idea that photography does not contain any truth in itself challenges the traditional understanding of photography as a truth-telling machine. For a long time, photography was seen as a medium that could capture and convey reality accurately. While photographs can be used for identification purposes, one must question the extent of this kind of truthfulness—can two identical twins be “truly” identified by photography alone? Amused by the claims of the truthfulness of photography, the French director Jean-Luc Godard quipped, “If photography is truth, then cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.”

Art soon responded to the realisation that the purpose of photography was the creation of likeness and not truthfulness. In the early days of the history of photography, there was a tendency to mistake likeness for truth. This was soon rectified, and the Western art world became populated with artists who were inspired by photography and sought to transcend it. Among the first group were artists like Edgar Degas, who began to make drawings based on photographs and incorporated photographic techniques into their work. The second group, perhaps the more influential section in art history, included artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They believed that the narrative nature and clarity of image-making in photography would liberate painting from narrative and literature. This belief was borne out in subsequent world art history, where we saw sculptural and pictorial arts evolving in anti-photographic and post-photographic directions. It was in this context that Swiss-German artist Paul Klee declared, “The purpose of art is not to express the visible but to make visible.”

This rendition of art history, according to which photography arose and challenged painters, has been developed and even subverted by some thinkers. Peter Galassi discusses this history in his book “Before Photography.” Galassi begins with the remarkable observation that the inventors of photography neither knew each other nor were aware that there were others working in the same field. That is, photography was independently discovered by many scientists travelling unique paths. In attempting to explain how this could happen, Galassi points out that photography is the product of a type of a gaze that was characteristic to a specific era. In effect, he was suggesting that the photographic vision existed before photography itself. That there were art movements like realism and naturalism before the advent of photography was evidence for this. As Kirk Varnedoe says, “Realism was not born with the discovery of photography any more than the discovery of perspective led to the Renaissance.” The relationship between these developments is exactly the opposite.

Galassi then draws on another essay to discuss the contradictory ways in which art historians have viewed photography. In “Art and Photography: Forerunners and Influences,” Heinrich Schwarz begins by discussing the influence of painting on early photography; but midway in the essay, he flips the logic upside down and shifts to describe how later painting developed based on photographs. Galassi points to the self-constructed narratives of 20th-century artists that contributed to the confusion about how to view photographs. This group of artists saw photography as an obstacle to overcome or reinterpreted it as such to make their art uniquely relevant. Van Deren Coke’s “The Painter and the Photograph,” which explores how photography has been used by painters, makes a similar argument. However, contemporary photography has begun to overcome this subordination to painterliness. An example is the book “Vivan Sundaram is not a Photographer” by Ruth Rosengarten, based on Vivan Sundaram’s photographs. In this book, Rosengarten introduces the term ‘post-photography’—for Rosengarten, the opposition is no longer between photography and painting as in the past, but between the ‘photographic’ and the ‘painterly.’ Rosengarten’s important reading of Vivan Sundaram’s art is that he is not a ‘photographer,’ but his artwork is ‘photographic’: thus, the title.

Two other artists who can be understood in the same way are N. Pushpamala and Ranbir Kaleka. Pushpamala’s intention is to create photographs that mimic paintings, but their real appeal lies in the fusion of performance and photography. The salient feature of these photographs is that Pushpamala herself enacts them; if it were anyone else, they would have to be read altogether differently. Photography returns as a tool in Pushpamala’s art to record her performances. However, the art of Pushpamala is not limited to the performativity. It is as much about the product obtained after passing it through the medium of photography. This product is a photograph, but more importantly, it is ‘photographic.’ Similarly, Kaleka brings a ‘photographic’ nature to his video and digital works. If Pushpamala’s work are photographs as well as ‘photographic’, Kaleka’s are only ‘photographic.’ The ‘photographic’ thus becomes disconnected from the photograph. Vivek Vilasini’s works can be compared to Pushpamala in this respect, especially the moments he creates through storytelling and photography. These, too, are often imitations of earlier paintings. However, their appeal lies in the fact that they are photographed performances. Indu Antony takes this a step further — her photographs imitate other photographs; like Pushpamala, she too enacts characters derived from existing images. The difference is that Indu Antony’s photographs are convolutedly self-referential. If Pushpamala photographs performances of paintings, Indu Antony photographs performances of photographs. A photograph of a photograph is a mere copy; a photograph of a performed photograph becomes a work of art. Indu Antony shows that to extract the ‘photographic’ from the photograph, it is necessary to mediate it with another art form. 

The American painter Edward Hopper once said that he used photography to study the details for his painting. Hopper’s art is what can be considered purely photographic. However, Hopper found that looking through the camera gave him a completely different perspective to the one he would use in his paintings. He never tried photography again. What can be seen in this experience is Hopper’s transition from the photograph to ‘photographic’—the impossibility of converting Hopper’s painting into photography lies in its perspective. Hopper paints his subjects as if zoomed in from infinity, providing a view from such a distance that his subjects seem isolated. At the same time, the many planes in Hopper’s painting do not share the same perspective, but Hopper gives them the impression of being same. Neither of these elements can be reproduced in photography, so Hopper’s painting, while still photographic, is impossible as a photograph. This is also what artists like Riyas Komu, Shibu Natesan, and T.V. Santosh are attempting, in one way or another. Even as they carry on their individual inquiries in the medium, their artistic form remains on a ‘photographic’ level similar to Hopper’s. They may use multiple photographs as references and sometimes paint or sculpt without using photography, but ultimately, the language their images speak is that of photography. 

Aji V.N.’s paintings behave contrary to this trend. What they seek is a painterly world, yet their perspectives are quite photographic. Artists like Aji V.N. and Shibu Natesan paint as if seen through telephoto lenses. The ‘collage’ in Aji’s painting can be said to be about time, and as we move from the top to the bottom of the painting, we feel the light, the weather and the time changing. For instance, a night sky might hover above sunlit trees. Moreover, the photographic perspective we get when viewing the entire picture becomes more painterly the closer we get; up close, leaves, clouds, rocks, and grass all transform into thick blocks of paint. Aji’s paintings eschew the fine detail of photography to a certain extent. It is as if he is beckoning us to look closer at our own photographic worlds — a thing seen from a distance becomes something else when observed up close.

In this way, performances, paintings, and photographs oscillate between being “painterly” and “photographic.” However, the “painterly” in these works never feels like a quality of reality but rather an indicator of an imaginary world; the painterly quality is a suggestion of exception rather than that of a norm. This is how a contemporary painting is essentially distinct from a classical oil painting. Photographs thus serve as the backdrop to these “painterly” works, and the “photographic” is always in dialogue with their painterly. This is perhaps the quest of today’s artists who speak the language of paintings: what is the world that photography cannot reach and only the painter has access to? Pushpamala’s works would probably say that the answer is History. Aji might argue that it is time. Many other answers are possible—outer space has yet to be transformed into art by photography, and most artistic interpretations of it are paintings. Can photography conquer the vast expanse of the universe beyond our skies? What experiences would it base itself on?

In exploring these realms, artists continuously redefine the boundaries and relationships between painting and photography. They seek to uncover dimensions and nuances that each medium alone cannot fully capture. This ongoing dialogue not only enriches the art forms themselves but also deepens our understanding of the worlds they represent, inviting us to look closer, think deeper, and appreciate the intricate dance between reality and imagination.

III

Can we further investigate the condition of the ‘photographic’? Three episodes might help us describe it better.

My friend and young sculptor Dhanraj’s latest sculpture was a commissioned portrait of Gandhi. He used about 15 photographs of Gandhi for this clay sculpture. At one stage, it became evident that the photographs of Gandhi from different angles were taken at various ages, hence there were inconsistencies in the way his chin and cheekbones looked. As a result, multiple ages of Gandhi were incorporated into the finished sculpture itself. Dhanraj rectified these issues, but what fascinated me is the Gandhi before the corrections—the ‘photographic collage Gandhi.’

Two days after this, I attended a presentation by artist Gigi Skaria, part of an event organized by the Kerala Lalitha Kala Academy. One of the works he exhibited was a collage made from several photographs of cities. In the center was a slum, surrounded by houses of various castes, and behind that, a row of shacks. The city wasn’t real — but nonetheless, it seemed more real than reality, in a strange way. Indeed, that was the point of the work.

A third example is the Statue of Unity, a humungous sculptural portrait of Sardar Patel, built in Gujarat. Although intended to symbolize India standing tall and strong, the finished sculpture did not quite match Patel’s body language. That Patel reminds me of an old man with his eyes fixed in the distance, his hands hanging down, who has lost all meaning in life and is waiting despondently for death to arrive. At the same time, a comparison with Patel’s photographs shows that the likeness is perfect. I believe precisely that likeness is what makes the sculpture weak. If we had only seen Sardar Patel in photographs, if we had not known what was written and said about him, we would have believed the sculpture, and looking at his photographs, we would have thought that Patel was an ordinary old man. But our image of Sardar Patel is that of a sturdy diplomat and leader; a fact that is scarcely reflected in his photographic portraits.

From these three instances, we can discern some aspects of the ontology of photographs today. First, photographs today do not capture reality, but create reality itself. The world we see around us is often revealed to us by photographs. Today we are used to seeing the nature, the sea, the city, and monuments by looking at photographs. That is why Gigi Scaria’s city feels real to us. It is like our own cities — a collage. Susan Sontag wrote that reality is falsely recorded in photographs. We must correct her: photography itself invents reality. In Sontag’s view, photographs have turned us into tourists: she claims that when we see a monument, we simply photograph it without creatively engaging with it. Sontag fails to see that the tourist would never be able to appreciate the monument without the mediation of photography — it is photography which sets for us the rules by which we interpret beauty. Therefore, the act of photographing monuments and festivals should be understood not as a degradation, as Sontag sees it, but as an active interpretation of those phenomena through photographs.

Secondly, how photographs see us is a more relevant question than how we see photographs. Since the 20th century, the photograph has been an important tool of propaganda. The ‘larger than life’ images of leaders from Hitler and Stalin to Gaddafi and Khomeini were crucial to their power-building. Middle-class families construct their identities, the working class expresses its aspirations, nations display their monuments and, commodities are advertised, and human beauty is defined — as seen and shown in photographs. Photography has encountered the market as much as it has encountered art. The market determines its exchange and production. As discussed earlier, the practice of photography in each period is not only derived from the particularity of the gaze of that period, but also from the market. One result of this was that in places like the United States, ‘social documentary’ photographs were able to enter the art market, allowing middle-class art lovers to acquire these records of poverty and suffering. Along with that, the common people were able to keep cheap prints of their favorite stars. Here, the middle class and the commoner are not two people, but two identities of the same person — there was now a possibility of hanging a Dorothea Lange print of American impoverishment on one wall and a Marilyn Monroe movie poster on the opposite wall in the same house. In such a house, one wall awakens the desires of a ‘common man’ and the other wall evokes the fear of a poverty-stricken life outside the safety of his home. Perhaps for the first time in history, a medium was able to bring the two extremes of life together. Photography is thus a medium of contradictions too.

Perhaps the thing that photographic reality has changed the most is our memory. In the past, the most auspicious, celebrated and anticipated moments of performances, those acts which consecrated the social body, were only imprinted in memories. Even in the 19th century, before the photograph took on its momentary nature, humans could not objectively remember a performer. With the advent of photography, man was ready to imprint on objective memory some traces of performance, the art of singing through sound recording devices, and with the advent of video, both together. Performance art also changed with this change of memory; performances today are held to be recorded, not necessarily for live viewing. The manner in which society curates its rituals has fundamentally shifted to respond to the arrival of photography.

IV

The Tamil mystic Ramana Maharshi refers to cinema to explain the concept of reality. When you go to the cinema, you see images running one by one on the screen — these images are the world of illusion around us, and the screen is the reality. In the same vein, we might retort to the Maharshi: we see the curtain only because there is an image on it. To understand reality, we ought to first recognise its ‘photographic’ elements. On the other hand, we are nearly at the end of an epoch. The holographic world is set to come. The technology of the hologram is completely different from that of photography — and so are the language and sensibilities of the hologram. Will the new world be photographic or holographic? Or will it be both?

In the last few weeks, we have received evidence of another possibility. Artificial intelligence software called DALL-E showed us its capabilities for the first time. If we give DALL-E a short description of a scene or image in our imagination, DALL-E will create a new image from its ‘imagination’ that matches that description. These pictures look just like the pictures made by real people. DALL-E can create images like photographs, paintings, and digital art. Today, if we say ‘Saul Leiter’s Thiruvananthapuram photograph’ to DALL-E, we will get a similar image. Whether Saul Leiter has come to Kerala is not an issue. Through DALL-E, we may now be entering a world that is textual at its core. From the painterly to the photographic to the textual — that may indeed be how art history is written in the future. The conceptual art of the past decades would then be reread as a foreshadowing of this world-to-come.