“…all the participants in photographic acts – camera, photographer, photographed subject, and spectator, approach the photograph as an intentional effect of the encounter between all of these…”
As intimated by visual culture theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in her book, The Civil Contract of Photography (2012), composing or taking a photograph itself can be inferred as the staging of reality. As dynamic source material, deflecting and reflecting both evidentiary and lyrical dimensions of the subject in view, the image, whether of oasis, landscape, architecture, or of communities, portraits, and ethnographic study, all contain elements of the performative. In ‘seeing’ the photograph, a suspended moment in time is stretched into the present, re-interrogating the act/event as well as the positionality/specificity of the looker. The spectator, the subject, and the photographer are then simultaneously within its gaze (and outside of it), negotiating fields of distance and proximity.
Spectatorship and Scenography in the Archives consists of an array of photographs from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The works in this display include landscape photographer, Dr. John Murray’s images of the Taj Mahal shot from the banks of the Yamuna River (1858-1862); amateur Parsi practitioner, Motivala in Delhi during the 1911 Durbar – to post-independence images from Habib Tanvir’s Agra Bazaar (1950s-1990s), stills from Jana Natya Manch’s Safdar Hashmi Shahadat Diwas (1989-present) as well as The Alkazi Theatre Photography grantee (2022), Kush Kukreja’s, Yamuna Local Stories. Collectively, they question whether the act of staging itself enables a captured instant to transcend its historicity? Unmoored from context, do such instances hover between the real and the constructed, and do they enact a new performance of claims and counter-claims, a new writing of history?
In state narratives and official archives of the nineteenth century, the South Asian landscape is still ‘looked at’ through the framework of the colonial gaze. However, they could also be considered ‘scenographic’ – a landscape that constantly changes meaning in the nexus of touristic imaginings, spectacles of power, and tropes of ‘Othering’. Can contemporary landscapes then also be considered differently? Can they be construed as the outcome of the ‘human’ as a ‘geological agent that has had an irreversible impact on the earth’?
In this exhibition, the relationship of the human/figural to landscapes and events is considered as tethered to the dyadic, interlinked fields of scenography and spectatorship. Unlike the portrait image which treats the photographer as the centre of focus, the content here, which is drawn variously spanning 150 years – from survey images and documented events to conceptually framed photographs – often shows the subject moving away, drawn to elements in the landscape, to the periphery and horizon. Framed as referents, as multiple points of view, they are indicators to moments that lie elsewhere, outside an intended line of sight.
Delhi: Shifting Visual Territory
This section contains two sets of photographs taken almost eighty years apart, from the pre-and post-colonial periods, as contrasting sites of exchange and social impact – the first by little-known amateur Parsi photographer, Motivala, from the album, The Delhi Durbar 1911; and the second, performance stills from Jana Natya Manch’s enactments at Dr. Ambedkar Park, Jhandapur, following the violent killing of Safdar Hashmi on 1 January 1989.
Motivala’s photographs capture general public attendees at the Coronation of King George V in 1911, when the capital transferred to Delhi from Calcutta. The sweeping, and often blurry perspective of the spectacle is observed through the gaze of the common man on the move in the crowd, in contradiction to the access given to court photographers such as Vernon and Co., and Bourne & Shepherd who formally captured the dignitaries from close quarters for princely albums. Motivala’s position is from within the public arena, the movement and positioning of the crowd with respect to the ceremonies and processions organised as part of the royal festivities that unfold at a distance, removed from imperial subjects.
The second set of photographs explores the street theatre work of Jana Natya Manch in the industrial area of Jhandapur, bringing to light participation and collaboration as two imperatives of their cultural activity. Safdar Hashmi Shahadat Diwas is organised annually as a memorial to Hashmi who was killed by political rivals during a performance of Halla Bol (Raise Your Voice). These ‘documentary’ images reveal an engaged socio-political moment that melds the ideological with the everyday, unlike official and/or people-led surveys/reportage that we see in the earlier section. While the photographs appear to focus on the spectacle of the performances and programs of Safdar Hashmi Shahadat Diwas, they can also offer an open-ended inquiry into the evidentiary nature of spectatorship, highlighting a changing social demography over thirty-three years and the evolving scenography of the industrial area.
Agra: Revisionist Inscription of Space
The figure of the human within the landscape is a running leitmotif in the photographs of this series, which span the technological transformation of image-making from the analogue to the digital era. They ask, how are political statements made through creative practice; can we imagine landscape or ‘location’ as a key variable to interrogate national, cultural and even personal histories through ‘placemaking’; and does the shifting role or character of the subject within the frame – as native, bystander, participant or actor – induce alterity and/or agency in the subaltern?
The earliest photographs here are of Dr. John Murray, who entered the East India Company as an Assistant Surgeon and was attached to various regiments, but served primarily with the Bengal Horse Artillery. In 1848, Murray was appointed Civil Surgeon of Agra and remained there for the next twenty years. Credited as the first extant photographer of the Taj Mahal in the mid-1850s, he visited the site repeatedly and photographed its architecture and gardens from every conceivable angle, paying particular attention to the foreground of crumbled ruins. The very idea of the ‘Empire’ depended in part on an idea of appropriating landscape – as both controlled space and visualising such control globally.
Set on the bank of the Yamuna in the city of Agra almost a hundred years later, Habib Tanvir’s play, Agra Bazaar was written and first staged in 1954, which included actors from Jamia Millia University’s faculty and student community, as well as dwellers from Okhla in Delhi. The play interweaves the poetry and nazms of Nazeer Akbarabadi, presenting Agra’s bazaar (market) that is reeling from economic depression, threatening the livelihood of the merchants, traders, hawkers, and vendors. The play explores the underlying theme of humanism and proletarianism, which is recurrent in Akbarabadi’s poems, by presenting the everyday life in the marketplace alongside the river – vagabonds, prostitutes, courtesans, potters, kite-makers, and beggars as part of the milieu. When a cucumber seller starts reciting Nazeer’s compositions, customers flock to his shop. Following this event, the entire bazaar hums Nazeer’s poetry and songs, leading to an economic upturn.
Kush Kukreja’s aesthetically deployed Yamuna Local Stories is a recent visual narrative that is directly or indirectly associated with the Yamuna River. It is based on research and surveys of the Yamuna, which exist in the form of archival open-source documents, devoid of images. Kukreja’s self-portraits are therefore a strategic means to aid and extrapolate the research paper as a theatrical act or script, wherein the Yamuna River becomes a stage, and the camera becomes an orchestrator of truth.
Walkthrough: Spectatorship and Scenography in the Archives
A Special Walkthrough with Zuleikha Chaudhari at Shridharani Gallery: Exploring ‘Spectatorship and Scenography in the Archives’ with Jana Natya Manch and Kush Kukreja
