Satish Sharma is an independent photographer, writer, cultural critic, and curator who has published and exhibited internationally. He has worked as a freelance photojournalist for leading Indian magazines and newspapers since 1975 and as documentary photographer for major international institutions like UNICEF.
Photography, after the Second World War and McCarthyism, was consciously pushed into the sanitised spaces of Art galleries and Museums away from its past as a concerned, conscience-pricking tool. We were told by institutional gatekeepers like the Museum of Modern Art in New York that Photography was only about Itself. It was an Art form that was about navel-gazing photographers and about flattened formalist fields. Photography was not supposed to exist outside its own frame.
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.
