World Photography Day

Celebrating the Evolution of a Timeless Art

On 19 August 1839, the French government, rather than exercising its sole right as patent-holder, decided to give photography “as a free gift to the world.” Many years later, towards the end of the twentieth century, the Indian photographer O P Sharma is said to have conceived the idea of celebrating this date as World Photography Day.

The French Academy of Sciences had bought the patent for the Daguerreotype process from Louis Daguerre. It is uncertain whether they understood that this was an invention that would change the world. In any case, the world has moved on from Daguerrotypes, which could not even be reprinted, to Magnetic Resonance Imaging, which uses radio waves and magnetic fields to obtain detailed images of the organs in the human body. On the other extreme, the Hubble Space Telescope probes the deep space to find things, patterns and events that are entirely beyond our normal realms of experience. The scientific use of photography has proceeded in all directions. Anna Atkins foresaw this utility when she used photographs to document plant species soon after the invention of photography.

The great chess champion Anatoly Karpov once said, “Chess is everything — art, science and sport.” Photography is not an Olympic sport yet. But people take photographs more for sport than ever before, and people take photographs of sports. Sport is even immortalised in photographs. Photography is certainly more popular than chess; it takes less effort to learn to take photographs than to play chess today, and a person, on average, would have taken more photographs in their life than they have played chess games.

The strangest thing about photography, however, is that it is an art. Plato predicted it when he said all art is imitation. He was actually talking about epic poetry and theatre, but he might as well have been talking about photography. Photography is indexical — it copies and freezes the world. Despite this umbilical tie with the external appearances of objects, photography approaches the essence, as Susan Sontag argues. A photograph is something more than a photocopy. This essence interested Narayana Guru too. The legend goes that when Guru saw a camera for the first time and asked what it was, he was informed that it could take a rasapadam — ‘Padam’ means picture in Malayalam — upon which he retorted, “Can it capture the rasa of a mango?”

The art of photography is this search for rasa, the essence. Artists who work with photography grapple with it. They try to extract it from the other objects in the world. Ideally, photography would be an art only as long as it engages in this struggle. The moment it stops doing so, it becomes a copy-making tool.

This is the duality of the medium today: on the one hand, there are fewer and fewer restrictions on the materials required to practice photography, and on the other, the generic approaches to photography threaten its existence as a serious art form. Fashion and street — these two modes account for a vast majority of photographic art. Indian photography, in particular, finds its market and viewers in the same genres as it did three decades ago. When Orhan Pamuk claimed that he liked Ara Güler’s photographs because they were beautiful, Güler responded, “You like my photographs because they remind you of your childhood.” Indians today like to make and see photographs which remind them of photography’s childhood, not those which reckon with the maturity of the medium.

On World Photography Day, we might invoke Plato again. Art as a copy of reality has little value. It ought to be in the service of Ideas. Particularly, it ought to be in the service of New Ideas, all the time.