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How Women Artists in South Asia Are Reinventing the Photobook

Photobooks force us to think outside and beyond the photograph. They serve as activist tools and sites for introspection. In South Asia, photobooks have experienced remarkable growth in recent years, instigated by artists’ urges to tell personal stories related to their social, political, and cultural situations. This gesture carries the belief that these stories are worth telling, that they can act as connective tissue between people in a global nervous system. The photobook experience—understood as the compilation of skillfully produced pictures and texts, held in one’s hand and savored, attentive to aesthetic and intellectual pleasures—can arguably be traced in India to the Islamic book, especially Mughal-era muraqqa, which contain painted images and writings. In the nineteenth century, the Indian photographer Raja Deen Dayal’s albums, with their careful arrangements of texts and images documenting architectural heritage, military maneuvers, and VIP visits to princely territories, and assembled by hand as multiples, can be considered photobooks in today’s terms.

Through the late twentieth century, the cost of publishing in India was prohibitive, despite the diversification of photographic practices. Those who found ways did so outside the country, such as Raghubir Singh, whose photobooks captured a sense of geographic and cultural contemporaneity. Dayanita Singh has been recognized for rethinking the photobook by playing with scale, materiality, and the nonstatic sequencing of images. The economic liberalization of the 1990s in India led to better quality and more affordable publishing opportunities with specialized printers in tune with photobook and self-publishing cultures. Initiatives such as BIND, the Alkazi Collection of Photography photobook grant, and the Delhi-based Offset have encouraged a new generation of image practitioners.

From her home in Toronto, the curator Deepali Dewan recently spoke by video with two compelling makers of photobooks: Indu Antony, a Bangalore-based artist, and Kaamna Patel, a Mumbai-based photographer and founder of JOJO Books. Together, they discussed new works made just before and during the pandemic lockdown, and how photobooks can give visibility to women’s experiences.

Kaamna Patel, cover of Dori, 2021

Deepali Dewan: In India, the energy around photobooks and self-publishing that’s going on, is so relevant to the larger global practice of photobook making. Both of you are at the forefront of that energy and creating some of the most exciting examples. Kaamna, photography is the main aspect of your visual practice, and through that, you’ve come to photobooks. What led you to making books? And Indu, you have a varied artistic practice of which photobooks have been a more recent aspect. At what point did you turn to photobooks as a part of your practice?

Kaamna Patel: I discovered photobooks through a friend who was already working with them. It was actually thanks to him that I really understood what it means to publish, or even self-publish. In my head, I said, Wow, you can self-publish? Why have I been knocking on the doors of galleries all this time? That’s the reason I decided to self-publish. Then the risk is mine, the loss is mine, and if there’s any success in reaching out to people through this, well, then, I will have done it, and I will know for sure whether my voice is worth amplifying or not.

Indu Antony: I did my first-ever photobook project in 2008. Surprisingly, I found it the other day, and I thought, Wow, I didn’t even know this was a photobook. At the time, I had attended a book-making workshop, and I was really excited about the idea of making books by hand.

I am part of a collective called Kanike. We are four artists who get together, share a space, and also make work collaboratively. Jolly Bird (2020) is the first piece that we did together, reflecting on what we went through during COVID, when the lockdown happened from March onward. The book comes with a small note describing our lockdown experiences. The title Jolly Bird is after a song by S. P. Balasubrahmanyam, who we lost during COVID, and the work opens with his lyrics. It’s a small dedication to him.

The book follows the different things that we did during the lockdown period. For example, for the forty days of the lockdown, which were quite intense, every day at 5:20 PM, I would record ten words that describe how I felt that day, such as lonely, love, sex, I, no, scooter, eraser, isolation, me, and off. It was a way to relieve my anxiety. We also used a lot of the news headlines and images from the lockdown: “Bengaluru police is using drones trying to find lockdown violators.” “Sales for sex toys rise 65 percent in post-COVID-19 lockdown: Karnataka stands second.” We made just fifty copies of the book, and it was so surprising that within twenty hours all fifty copies were sold out. We were quite shocked to see how people were responding to this collective book.

Spreads from Indu Antony and Kanike collective, Jolly Bird, 2020
All works courtesy the artists

Dewan: Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons (2021), rather than a bound book, has loose pages collected in a box that opens up, and each page has a photographic image on it with text on the back corresponding to that image. How did this come about?

Antony: During the lockdown, everybody went into an extensive cleaning of their homes as I did. I found mountains of boxes that I’ve collected with objects from my life. I wanted to slow down. Though everything around was still, my mind was not still. So I started taking out each of these objects, and, at that point, I had only watercolor papers. So I was like, Okay, let me stitch each of these objects onto the paper using a strand of my hair and see what happens. The idea of having the book in the form of a box, where you open it with a tiny window, indicates a small window into my life—who I am. The box is made of Kora cloth. I went hunting for Kora cloth, which are rejects from the railways in Bangalore, and got someone to actually make those boxes. And then the box actually went into another Kora cloth bag stitched by me.

Dewan: Kaamna, your most recent projects are In Today’s News: Alpha Males and Women Power (2019) and Dori (2020). Can you describe these projects and give a sense of their materiality?

Patel: Dori means thread in Gujarati. I was playing on the idea of a “thread” that joins me to my grandparents, the focus of the book, and eventually that will join their story to future generations. I put everyone to work, and it became a family project, in a way. My aunt, who is their daughter, did the painted portraits of my grandparents reproduced on the front and back on paper that feels like canvas. She’s a dentist and also an artist. Actually, this book was a collaboration between all of their kids and me. At the end, there is a text in Gujarati and in English. One text is my voice, and the other text is a foreword by Veeranganakumari Solanki, who is a curator and a writer. My other aunt, who lives in LA, helped with the translations of both texts.

In Today’s News was made with yotsume toji, a type of Japanese binding, and with unbleached, uncoated paper that gives it a yellow tint. Essentially, the book opens with an image from the newspaper. And the title as well comes from a headline that I found in the newspaper. This project basically started as Instagram stories.

It was also a response to the fact that the #MeToo movement was still strong in India. I realized that through the exercise of making those Instagram stories, I had a lot of concerns cropping up in my mind, and I thought maybe I should put them down and see what comes through. The themes for me were primarily women’s sexuality; the evolving role of women in society, whether as a moral support system for men or as more independent, working individuals; and issues related to victims of domestic abuse. It was just kind of an outpour. I had this whole collection of images on my phone, and then, when I decided to actually explore it a little more, I started scanning and using a better camera.

Kaamna Patel, spread from Dori, 2021

Dewan: Has this past year in the lockdown been, in some ways, a generative and creative space for producing photobooks?

Antony: I don’t think either Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons or Jolly Bird would have happened if not for the lockdown. Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons developed because I was so craving touch. Looking at those objects in my memory boxes was like a certain kind of calmness. Not only were there good memories, but there were also heavy memories in them. But at least I had the tactility of touching them. So it came out of that space.

Jolly Bird, also, is a result of 2020’s events because all four of us were looking at how to survive the pandemic: What are we doing with our surroundings? What were we making and reflecting on? We put all of that together and then made the book.

Even though we find ourselves in a place where you can receive threats just for expressing yourself in your photobook, I hope that in a couple of years that will change. I think that’s a risk you take if you’re going to bare your soul in your work.

Patel: Actually, I wasn’t even thinking about making books that year. I took to writing, working on grant projects, proposals, residency applications, things like that. It was toward the end of 2020 when I realized Dori was almost there. It had been in the making for five years. I had done many different versions of it and many different edits, and I finally had come to this almost final stage. It was just about picking the format and getting the design elements together. So it was quite an impulsive decision. I said, Okay, it’s ready.

Dewan: To what extent do you find the photobook a space that is a good platform to bring forward a landscape of the personal? What does the photobook allow you to do that another format doesn’t?

Patel: Because books are small, for the most part, and intimate, you hold them close to you. As a reader, once I have the book, once I open it, I choose how much time I spend with the images, how I go back and forth through the pages, where I read it, whether I read it in my personal space, whether I read it in a public space. All of this allows you to experience somebody else’s story as if it were your own. That’s why it’s so conducive to communicating, honestly and candidly, a story that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise want to put up on the wall.

Indu Antony, Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons, 2021

Antony: Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons is a project in itself, and none of it would ever exist in any other format than this particular book. It’s a great format for people to express their personal narratives.

Dewan: Your work gives a certain attention to women’s lives that doesn’t often get seen in a public sphere. How do you feel the photobook allows you to do that? Kaamna, In Today’s News is as personal as Dori, because these are your selections from newspapers. I recall hearing you say that decontextualizing a newspaper image from its context and putting it together with something else creates a different kind of narrative that is very much about your reading of the popular press. But both works also occupy the space of giving visibility to women’s experiences and women’s lives in a different way than is often represented in the public sphere. Can you talk about that?

Patel: You are absolutely right. That is exactly what I was thinking of when I was taking these images out of their context and putting them into diptychs that made sense to me as diptychs—so basically putting them straight into another chronology. That’s because I really believe that images are very, very powerful in the sense that they show truth, but they can also show lies and make you believe they’re true. And somewhere in that middle ground is where you can arrive at a subjective truth, which reveals to you something not only about yourself but about what you understand about the world, your perspective on life, and everything else. So in that sense, yes, it’s deeply personal.

But as far as using photobooks to create a feminist space, I wouldn’t say that I am doing this actively. It’s definitely not an agenda that I am chasing. It just so happens that I am a woman who has been raised to be independent in a country like India. So the feminist message is really just a part of my story and a part of my life. It’s just natural to me. So it’s only natural that it comes out within the work I make because that’s the lens with which I view the world.

Antony: Why Can’t Bras Have Buttons, even though it’s about me, also talks about some form of abuse, some form of what my body has gone through, my own identity. Which is why it’s not all beautiful memories, but it is also about my existence, and my gender, and what I as a person have gone through.

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Dewan: It feels like a very raw and honest representation of female life, and at the same time something that, I imagine, is very relatable for many of us. Do you feel there’s risk in that, in putting out this aspect of women’s lives in a space like India, or even in the world?

Antony: Since my book was released, someone wrote to me through Instagram, and he started threatening me. It’s still not an easy thing, because it took a lot for me to be as vulnerable as possible, to put out a book such as this one, to talk about things that my closest friends would not know. But I felt it was, in some way, important to do so. So, yes, it’s not easy.

Patel: Being a woman in India, and generally a woman in a man’s playground, at some point in your life, you are going to have to face abuse. Speaking out in a country like India is difficult because of this sense of the self-appointed moral police that encourages repression in our society, which eventually leads to us not being able to talk about our sexuality, or our needs, or things that are happening to us. It’s the shame culture that we live in—that’s probably where it’s coming from.

But I feel like it’s definitely changing. And the support systems for artists who speak out are growing. So even though we find ourselves in a place where you can receive threats just for expressing yourself in your photobook, I hope that in a couple of years that will change. I think that’s a risk you take if you’re going to bare your soul in your work, because you are speaking things that either nobody wants to hear or everyone wishes they could say, and so you find solidarity in it. Either way, it has to be done.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 243, “Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In,” under the title “The Photobook as Public Space.”

The Photographer Confronting the Restlessness of Lockdowns

Tirtha Lawati was born in Nepal and raised in Britain. He grew up across a number of counties—Kent, North Yorkshire, and Warwickshire—before studying photography at Warwickshire College, and then fashion photography at London College of Fashion. His editorials published in Vogue Italia and Dazed narrate fashion collections designed by his peers, of models at ease in clothes worn with confidence; but his own portfolio documents the tentative experience of first-generation Asian youth in the UK, suspended between the worldview of their parents and the accommodation of British values. For Lawati, the boundaries of the home also express this tension: “I have been exposed to two identities, one being inside the home, and one being outside,” he tells me. He describes his ongoing project Nyauli as a call for home. It refers to the Great Barbet (Nyauli), a bird native to Nepal whose song, according to folklore, is that of a lost lover.

The UK’s COVID-19 lockdowns forced Lawati to confront his own conception of home over an extended period of time spent in close confines with his extended family. What started as practical exercises to stem his restlessness—teaching himself the qualities of natural light by shooting in the garden at dawn, trying his hand at nature photography, or taking portraits of his nieces during breaks between home-schooling lessons—soon developed into a studied depiction of domestic life based on his own compositions. Lawati works by first drawing his portraits and then staging them. This process lends the images a somewhat studied sense, as though they are vignettes in which his family are the protagonists.

“I wanted to do something to transform bleak times into something playful, something like a reality,” Lawati says. His project was produced partly out of the prevailing restrictions, so he had to use a postal lab service to develop the analog film. Despite the pandemic’s varied obstacles, this new body of work, published here for the first time, is finely observed and supplies the distraction of small details.

The photographs are strangely familiar. They speak of roles and responsibilities in family relations but in unlikely terms. A blanket drying on a clothesline envelops a matriarch, fists raised, a smile on her lips, and a beanie pulled over the crown of a wide-brimmed summer hat; an older man rests the fullness of his palm on his head in a gesture of self-possession; a girl dozes as she inhales the hair of the younger sister in her arms. They are tender likenesses that radiate with a sense of security in being held.

Lawati’s nieces became a particular focus, as they were the same age that Lawati and his sister were when they first arrived in Britain to confront a new life and a new language. The struggles of Lawati’s assimilation is lost on the two young girls, who speak English as their mother tongue. Lawati captures the desire to overcome a generational divide in a portrait of his nieces with their hair plaited with lacha, a traditional red hair accessory worn by Nepali women with floral appendages made from raw jute fiber, yarn, beads and threads. Like most young girls, Lawati’s nieces wear the braids their own way, studded with chrysanthemums picked from the garden. One of them raises a hand to the sky, as a plastic dragonfly rests on her fingertip. 

The image is inspired by a memory of Lawati’s early childhood in Nepal, when he was fascinated by the dragonfly, attracted by the whirring of its wings as it hovers almost still in midair. Trying to connect experience across a generation’s worth of difference, Lawati depicts the dragonfly as symbolic of living freely, and in the photograph, it is gifted benevolently to his nieces. He intends to continue to photograph them, he says, to follow “how they cope and how they find the answer to their identity or sense of belonging.” 

All photographs by Tirtha Lawati from the series Nyauli, 2020–ongoing
Courtesy the artist

Read more from our series “Introducing,” which highlights exciting new voices in photography.

A Sweeping Reconsideration of Photography and Land Use in America

When Sandra S. Phillips was named curator emerita of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016, after three very busy decades leading the department, she had no intention of slowing down. In fact, she was actively at work on what fairly can be called the most ambitious project of her career to date: American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, an exhibition scheduled to appear at SFMOMA in 2020. Lamentably, the exhibition itself was a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic, but the accompanying publication—much more than a catalogue—was published earlier this year by Radius Books in Santa Fe.

Lucas Foglia, George Chasing Wildfires, Eureka, Nevada, 2012
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtGarfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake, from Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack 04.21.06, 2006
Courtesy the artist

The book has ninety-four beautifully printed full-page plates plus an illustrated catalogue of the 165 photographs selected by Phillips with Sally Martin Katz, curatorial assistant at SFMOMA. The main text by Phillips is followed by essays by Richard B. Woodward, Hilary N. Green, Jenny Reardon, Layli Long Soldier, and Richard White, and a poem by Beverly Dahlen. A concluding chapter highlights twenty-three photobooks illustrating American land use that “were, until quite recently, the principal resource for understanding the subject.”

An extended preface by the late writer and environmental activist Barry Lopez sets the tone. Before he began discussing the project with Phillips, he notes, she had already assembled extensive photographic evidence of “clearcuts, toxic settling ponds, transmission towers, contrails, open pit mines, stalled traffic, sprawling feed lots, and the rest of humanity’s infrastructure.” At first he urged her to include, in addition, “other, perhaps more welcoming photographs . . . of unmanipulated land. . . . But,” he writes, “I came around to her point of view.” The selection of photographs squarely faces what Lopez calls “the boot prints, if you will, of the colonial invader.”

Wendy Red Star, Indian Summer, from the series Four Seasons, 2006
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtRoger Minick, Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park, CA, 1980
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Phillips’s essay skillfully traces the intertwined histories of American photography and land use in America, together with what might be called their metahistories: not just what humans were doing on and to the land, but what they thought about what they were doing; not just what pictures photographers were making but how those pictures reached their audiences and how they were interpreted. She persuasively treats the various threads as aspects of a single story, with the result that many familiar elements are seen in a fresh light.

Amani Willett, “Hiding Place,” Cambridge, MA, from the series The Underground Railroad, 2010
Courtesy the artist

The same is true of the selection and presentation of the photographs. Phillips explains that American Geography expands on the groundwork of an exhibition and catalogue titled Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, which she presented at SFMOMA in 1996. Nineteenth-century photographs of the American West have been a staple of photographic history from the beginning, and comparable attention has been lavished upon both the romantic idealism of Western landscape photography in the twentieth century and the critical view of the human footprint that followed: the pictures that rigorously cropped out cars and telephone wires, then the pictures that went the extra mile to include them. Nineteenth-century landscape photography in the eastern US was largely ignored, however. As Woodward points out, that changed dramatically with East of the Mississippi, Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography, a major exhibition organized by Diane Waggoner at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 2017 and, now, with American Geography.

Alec Soth, Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin, 2002
Courtesy the artistSheron Rupp, St. Albans, Vermont, 1991
Courtesy the artist and Robert Klein Gallery

Dramatic as it is, the inclusion of the eastern US is only one aspect of the originality of Phillips’s exhibition. (Partly because the great majority of the original prints belong to SFMOMA or to San Francisco’s Sack Photographic Trust—Phillips played a key role in building both collections—it is not unreasonable to hope that the museum may mount the actual exhibition in the not terribly distant future.) Given the centrality of the theme to American photography as a whole, it is not surprising that the selection includes dozens of familiar, even famous photographs by celebrated photographers. They need to be here, but they sing with a new resonance in concert with an equal number of marvelous but unfamiliar images, some of them by photographers whose names are unknown even to specialists. Many pictures bring the project right up to date, such as Stanley Greenberg’s Coronavirus Shelter, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York (2020); other contemporary pictures explicitly point at the past, such as one made in 2017 by Dawoud Bey for his beautifully somber series retracing the Underground Railroad. More than one in ten of the photographs in the book were made within the past decade, which says a good deal about a project of such historical breadth.

Stanley Greenberg, Coronavirus Shelter, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Like the work of Phillips’s longtime friend Robert Adams (rightly featured here), her book is distinguished by its equanimity. It addresses without flinching what we Europeans have done to the land and the Native peoples of what we now call America, as well as to the people we brought here forcibly. It is not a pretty picture, and there is no escaping that this painful past and alarming present are contributing to a still more alarming global reality. And yet the book is, if not exactly beautiful, then richly eloquent—a powerful testament to photography’s uncanny capacity to reward the act of looking clearly at something that matters.

American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present was published by Radius Books in May 2021.

A Sweeping Look at American Landscape Photography

When Sandra S. Phillips was named curator emerita of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016, after three very busy decades leading the department, she had no intention of slowing down. In fact, she was actively at work on what fairly can be called the most ambitious project of her career to date: American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present, an exhibition scheduled to appear at SFMOMA in 2020. Lamentably, the exhibition itself was a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic, but the accompanying publication—much more than a catalogue—was published earlier this year by Radius Books in Santa Fe.

Lucas Foglia, George Chasing Wildfires, Eureka, Nevada, 2012
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtGarfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake, from Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack 04.21.06, 2006
Courtesy the artist

The book has ninety-four beautifully printed full-page plates plus an illustrated catalogue of the 165 photographs selected by Phillips with Sally Martin Katz, curatorial assistant at SFMOMA. The main text by Phillips is followed by essays by Richard B. Woodward, Hilary N. Green, Jenny Reardon, Layli Long Soldier, and Richard White, and a poem by Beverly Dahlen. A concluding chapter highlights twenty-three photobooks illustrating American land use that “were, until quite recently, the principal resource for understanding the subject.”

An extended preface by the late writer and environmental activist Barry Lopez sets the tone. Before he began discussing the project with Phillips, he notes, she had already assembled extensive photographic evidence of “clearcuts, toxic settling ponds, transmission towers, contrails, open pit mines, stalled traffic, sprawling feed lots, and the rest of humanity’s infrastructure.” At first he urged her to include, in addition, “other, perhaps more welcoming photographs . . . of unmanipulated land. . . . But,” he writes, “I came around to her point of view.” The selection of photographs squarely faces what Lopez calls “the boot prints, if you will, of the colonial invader.”

Wendy Red Star, Indian Summer, from the series Four Seasons, 2006
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtRoger Minick, Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park, CA, 1980
Courtesy the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Phillips’s essay skillfully traces the intertwined histories of American photography and land use in America, together with what might be called their metahistories: not just what humans were doing on and to the land, but what they thought about what they were doing; not just what pictures photographers were making but how those pictures reached their audiences and how they were interpreted. She persuasively treats the various threads as aspects of a single story, with the result that many familiar elements are seen in a fresh light.

Amani Willett, “Hiding Place,” Cambridge, MA, from the series The Underground Railroad, 2010
Courtesy the artist

The same is true of the selection and presentation of the photographs. Phillips explains that American Geography expands on the groundwork of an exhibition and catalogue titled Crossing the Frontier: Photographs of the Developing West, 1849 to the Present, which she presented at SFMOMA in 1996. Nineteenth-century photographs of the American West have been a staple of photographic history from the beginning, and comparable attention has been lavished upon both the romantic idealism of Western landscape photography in the twentieth century and the critical view of the human footprint that followed: the pictures that rigorously cropped out cars and telephone wires, then the pictures that went the extra mile to include them. Nineteenth-century landscape photography in the eastern US was largely ignored, however. As Woodward points out, that changed dramatically with East of the Mississippi, Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Photography, a major exhibition organized by Diane Waggoner at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 2017 and, now, with American Geography.

Alec Soth, Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin, 2002
Courtesy the artistSheron Rupp, St. Albans, Vermont, 1991
Courtesy the artist and Robert Klein Gallery

Dramatic as it is, the inclusion of the eastern US is only one aspect of the originality of Phillips’s exhibition. (Partly because the great majority of the original prints belong to SFMOMA or to San Francisco’s Sack Photographic Trust—Phillips played a key role in building both collections—it is not unreasonable to hope that the museum may mount the actual exhibition in the not terribly distant future.) Given the centrality of the theme to American photography as a whole, it is not surprising that the selection includes dozens of familiar, even famous photographs by celebrated photographers. They need to be here, but they sing with a new resonance in concert with an equal number of marvelous but unfamiliar images, some of them by photographers whose names are unknown even to specialists. Many pictures bring the project right up to date, such as Stanley Greenberg’s Coronavirus Shelter, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York (2020); other contemporary pictures explicitly point at the past, such as one made in 2017 by Dawoud Bey for his beautifully somber series retracing the Underground Railroad. More than one in ten of the photographs in the book were made within the past decade, which says a good deal about a project of such historical breadth.

Stanley Greenberg, Coronavirus Shelter, Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Like the work of Phillips’s longtime friend Robert Adams (rightly featured here), her book is distinguished by its equanimity. It addresses without flinching what we Europeans have done to the land and the Native peoples of what we now call America, as well as to the people we brought here forcibly. It is not a pretty picture, and there is no escaping that this painful past and alarming present are contributing to a still more alarming global reality. And yet the book is, if not exactly beautiful, then richly eloquent—a powerful testament to photography’s uncanny capacity to reward the act of looking clearly at something that matters.

American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present was published by Radius Books in May 2021.

Paul Pfeiffer on the Transformative Effects of the Pop Culture Image

Paul Pfeiffer’s practice spans sculpture, video, installation, and photography. His central material and concern over more than twenty years has been the photographic, televisual, and filmic image in the context of our mainstream habits of image consumption. Much of Pfeiffer’s work has centered on forms of racialized performance in sporting events like boxing matches and basketball and football games—sites of mass spectacle with deep and widespread cultural appeal. He has also made work in response to concert performances, and to iconic films or physical sites that have acquired a ubiquity for their connections to the visual vernacular of social life. Pfeiffer’s work has focused on the transformative effects of popular cultural images on our embodied and psychic experiences of the world. That work has developed in the context of his ongoing interest in the histories of globalized labor and racialized violence.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa: Our conversation about your work began in the shadow of the summer of 2020, which is to say in the wake of the spectacular murder of George Floyd, and the broader mobilizations in support of the Movement for Black Lives and against the murder of unarmed Black and brown people, of whom there are far, far too many to name. This year also marks the release of a new piece in your series of video works, Caryatid [2015–20], which debuted online in the winter of 2020, streaming publicly for the first time alongside thirteen other works in the series. The Caryatid works have hitherto only been exhibited as videos on embedded screens that double as sculptural forms in your exhibitions, so I thought we might start by talking about the continuation of this series of works in the context of the digital circulation of images of racialized violence. How do the works engage the phenomenon of image circulation?

Paul Pfeiffer: Your question brings to mind the way images go viral today. Images are sent and received instantly by every handheld device around the globe in the blink of an eye. The recent electoral cycle in the US reveals the extent to which people live in siloed realities. The algorithmic filtering of information and viewpoints forms a structure of self-encapsulating feedback loops. Isolation bubbles. The algorithm works to identify patterns of behavior and reinforces them, making them stronger, pushing them to greater extremes, to the point where they become impossible to disrupt. In this hyper-mediated state, consumer appetites for the real in the form of simulacra grow more voracious.

What I’m engaging in my works is not just the circulation of images of racialized violence but its normalization. How can it be that the brutality of racial terror coexists so seamlessly and comfortably with the supposed civility and normalcy of everyday life? A series of savage, execution- style killings of beloved family members is ongoing in real time while people lounge on the grass chatting and laughing. We make a periodic show of public outrage or disavow complicity, but the murders continue. It’s business as usual. It’s like the postcards of vicious lynchings of Black men and women that were casually circulated not long ago, where white families are seen socializing their children at picnics in the park with gruesome bodies hanging overhead. The Caryatid series of videos, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [2000–18] photos, respond to the shockingly high threshold of acceptance for the normalization of anti-Black violence in American culture.

Paul Pfeiffer, Vitruvian Figure, 2008

Wolukau-Wanambwa: I think what’s terrifying about the seeming paradox of your question [“How can it be that the brutality of racial terror coexists so seamlessly and comfortably with the supposed normalcy of everyday life?”] is that it reveals that that violence is constitutive of normalcy. Even the intensity of anti-Black violence as spectacle seems readily absorbable within the parameters of the normal for so many segments of society. The architectural theorist Reinhold Martin describes infrastructure—whether railroads, postal services, or financial markets—as something that repeats, and he argues that repetition is “not only sequence or meter; it is also sheer persistence.” I would argue something similar about anti-Black violence and violence against racial difference in the US more broadly: it serves an infrastructural function in the preservation of normalcy.

Of course we’re now speaking in the shadow of the armed insurrection against the certification of the 2020 US election at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in which explosive devices were left at government buildings and weapons were fired by white rioters inside the Capitol on a day that left five people dead and hundreds injured. This was a white seditious riot against the votes of Black and brown people in Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. Repetition abounds, in the guise of history, and already it seems that “the normal” will reassert itself. It began to do so in the manner that the Senate chamber restarted the certification process that same evening.

In the Caryatid pieces, there’s a palpable digital materiality to the flesh rendered in the image that speaks to post-processing and technological intervention, and that gives it a texture. Those processes of mediation are repeated in the structure of the piece, by virtue of it being looped. But repetition also figures in the logic of a boxing fight, where blows rain down on bodies persistently over time. I want to ask you about your use of the loop in relation to this question of media’s effects on feeling and behavior. Could you talk a little about that form of repetition in your practice and in these works specifically?

Pfeiffer: What draws me to explore the loop is the hypnotic quality of this simple form. There’s something irresistible and transfixing about looped, repeated images—also repeated sounds, words, phrases, etc. It’s something primal and intuitive, like a moth to the flame. We can think of it in terms of psychological resonance. Repetition is the telltale sign of hidden trauma, to use a critical framework drawing on the history of psychoanalytic literature. Repetition is the evidence of repressed experiences and memories too difficult to bear, so toxic that we try to forget them. We bury them. We send them underground, relegating them to the unconscious so we don’t have to see them or think about them anymore. But they always come back, usually as ghosts, nervous tics, and other disorders. That’s the repetition. We can’t explain the repetitive nervous tic or the insistent ghostly return of the deceased, because we’ve purposely buried or erased their root cause. This is the digital surface texture you mentioned, as well, the texture of post-production image manipulation. It appears as a glitch or ripple across the surface of the image, but in fact it’s a symptom or trace of the otherwise invisible hand of the editor. It also relates to the notion of infrastructure you referenced via Reinhold Martin—infrastructure as a foundational element of the built environment, systematizing routine functions to enable the more aspirational agenda of day-to-day activities. Infrastructure is the plumbing that drains our showers and toilets, also the high-speed internet cables piping bandwidth into our homes and work spaces. It’s what’s running underground. The fact that it’s hidden out of sight is what defines it as effective.

Another facet of the loop and its hypnotic effects relates to the more recent field of behavioral psychology, as distinct from psychoanalysis. I saw a shrink before who broke it down this way: unlike psychoanalysis, which is focused on investigating root causes buried below the surface, behavioral psychology’s focus is more pragmatic. It’s concerned with making changes to behavior in the here and now without the deep dive into root causes. From a behavioral perspective, the looped image, or any other repetitive signal, is a means to induce an alpha brain wave state, related to the state of meditation or deep inner focus in which the brain is most relaxed, open, and receptive to perceiving the fluidity and impermanence of all things. It’s the state in which we’re most receptive to rewiring old patterns of behavior, like using hypnosis to alter one’s automatic response to emotional triggers in order to quit smoking, or otherwise reprogram undesirable habits.

Paul Pfeiffer, Video stills from Caryatid (Broner), 2019

Wolukau-Wanambwa: There are such wonderfully opposing valences in those readings of repetition, which seem not only truthful but important to me. Repetition as pathology, but also repetition as receptivity. Staying with the most recent Caryatid piece, this is the first work in the series to have debuted specifically as a web-based image-object, isn’t it? The other works have been embedded within televisions or monitors that are treated sculpturally, often placed on the floor or protruding out of a white wall like miniature consoles. I’m interested in how this shift in the mode of delivery and display strikes you, and how you think about these pieces in the media environment of the web browser (whether on desktop, cellphone, tablet) as against the white space of the gallery. What changes in that shift for you?

Pfeiffer: The distinction you make between the white cube as a mode of delivery (of contemporary art) versus the circulation of images via the web and social media speaks to me of the condition of simultaneity that characterizes the mediatized environment. Multiple channels or platforms of display and distribution coexist simultaneously. They’re not mutually exclusive. We move in and out of them continually. This is reflected in the fields of journalism and broadcasting, for example, where multi-platform storytelling has become a common strategy. I think of it in terms of different time zones operating in parallel. Over the past year of Zoom it’s become second nature to negotiate time in a relational manner to allow people in different time zones to connect. The same is true of our capacity to inhabit multiple spaces simultaneously.

I don’t mean to deny the definitive influence of web-based and social media today. Just the opposite. My take on it relates to what activist journalist Maria Ressa has been saying about the nature of Facebook: she describes it as a form of behavior modification. It’s not just greater reach and speed of circulation that defines it. The impact goes deeper. Past a certain threshold, the speed and penetration of global networks in combination with the filtering power of algorithms exceeds the limits of human discernment. There’s a saying, the fish can’t see the water.

In the era of social media the invisible hand of the editor is evident everywhere, casting into doubt the very ground on which we stand, the ground of civil society. We’ve only just begun to wrap our brains around the situation. The 2016 Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which the personal data of millions of Facebook users was harvested and used to attempt to influence voters, is one glaring example. Others include the role of social media in the ongoing Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, or the spin war surrounding extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, not to mention the last four years of MAGA Twitter posts culminating in the mess of COVID-19 and the 2020 election cycle. It’s no coincidence that QAnon and other outlandish claims compete for bandwidth in the public sphere. A generalized intuition prevails that things are not what they seem.

Which brings us back to the looped image and its multiple valences. To invoke the shadow of the summer of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd is to acknowledge the primacy of the digital circulation of images of racialized violence today, with its opposing valences of repetition as pathology and repetition as receptivity. You could argue that the viral circulation of such images on social media serves to normalize the violence, making it okay, though the mass uprisings it has galvanized suggest other possible outcomes. A counter argument is that the proliferation of cameras, screens, and networks inadvertently brings to the surface an otherwise repressed, psychopathic infrastructure of anti-Black violence at the foundation of civil society that normally goes unacknowledged and unspoken (at least for some), and in bringing it to light, renders it palpable and intolerable.

Paul Pfeiffer, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (09), 2004

Wolukau-Wanambwa: I think that the other series of works you’ve made that most powerfully connects to the murder of George Floyd—I would call it a public lynching—are your Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse photographs. In them, you take press images of emphatic moments of athletic accomplishment by Black or African American NBA players, scan the photographs and painstakingly erase the net and its physical supports, along with every other player and the basketball itself, leaving one single Black figure in space. The players glide or float in tensed yet graceful exertion, and when they float above the ground, they sometimes resemble the desiccated figures of lynched African American men strung from telegraph poles and trees across the United States. Could you talk a little about the evolution of that series, the method of its making, and the various valences at play in the works?

Pfeiffer: What’s essential for me is that the series begins with images from the NBA press archive. The archive dates back to the NBA’s founding in 1946, and now includes mil lions of pictures. Every year in the run-up to the NBA Finals the archive expands to include tens of thousands of new shots taken during the current season’s games. When I sift through the archive I’m looking for that one-in-a-million image that contains certain chance elements necessary for me to do my work.

The edited pictures bring to mind many things, as you say, but they are first and foremost rooted in the everyday context and populist language of spectator sports. This context is purposely encoded in the works’ visual DNA so that they speak in a voice that is familiar, commonplace, even banal. At the same time, by subjecting the source material to extensive editing in Photoshop to remove jersey numbers, team logos, and other details, they are prevented from signifying in the way they were originally intended. Instead, they speak more or less obliquely in an open-ended mode, their signifying process—their identity as it were—purposefully rendered incomplete. In a way they’re like Rorschach tests. What they end up saying to the viewer differs greatly depending on the person who encounters them and the particular life experience they bring with them to the encounter.

There are viewers who grew up in the culture of basketball, especially street basketball, who see the transfiguration of a scene they know intimately. There are many sports fans and art collectors who can identify the player without the benefit of jersey numbers or team logos, even with the figure’s back to the camera. Others see the Crucifixion of Christ and other themes from the history of religious painting. And as you point out, there are ghosts or afterimages of the photographic history of the public lynching of African American men. This last one has always been, for me, a particularly potent, provocative aspect of the images in the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series. Which is why it’s always seemed poignant to me how seldomly it’s been discussed explicitly by commentators on the series. Almost never. Until now. You’re really the first to focus on it explicitly with me in a conversation format.

I don’t mean to be disingenuous on this point.

Paul Pfeiffer, Installation of The Saints, 2007
All images © Paul Pfeiffer. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Wolukau-Wanambwa: Not at all! That silence is something I’ve noted in the archive of writing and discussion about your work: the absence of an investigation of forces of racialization within examinations of the material you work with, and the kinds of complex utterances and experiences that your work produces. I want to talk more about the resonance of lynching in the Four Horsemen series, but I think that to do so productively requires what might seem like a detour.

So in your extraordinary installation The Saints [2007], which comprises a seemingly empty room filled with the rhythmic sounds of a crowd watching a football match and chanting songs in support of England’s national team, we find, at the far end of vast, empty, negative space, a tiny white console displaying looped black-and-white footage of one football player running around otherwise empty grass. It’s a video of the match in which England famously won the World Cup for the first and only time in 1966. Around the back of the wall that hosts this tiny console, there’s a black box space in which a two-channel video shows a large audience of Filipino men and women watching that match projected in an IMAX movie theater, and chanting along as “fans” in rhythmic fidelity to the original audience.

In this piece, as in your Vitruvian Figure [2008] piece, members of a racially distinct globalized audience are the principal, unheralded, and essential agents of spectacles of white national identity. There’s an ecology of production at stake that’s globalized and racialized in important ways: a division of labor in the production of spectacles for mass consumption that fortify expressly nationalist models of identity through athletic achievement. These are the proving grounds of the nation-state as a virtuous project: the Olympics, the World Cup, the NBA “World Championships.” At the root of the production of these scenes, and of the affects that seek to bond their recipients to the national image and the project of the white nation-state, we find Black and brown bodies: the crowd in Manila who mimic the English fans, the mass of Filipino men and women who made the stadium seats for Vitruvian Figure, the Black and African American athletes who keep the NBA alive . . .

I guess I think that you’ve partly been making work these many years that undermines the notional centrality, authority, and entitlements of the white spectator as the assumed audience for performative expression. And I think your critics seem to have totally missed that that’s a central part of the work. Am I way off base? If your work has frequently been engaged with the spectacle, the identity of the spectator has not been fixed and monolithic, but that seems not to have been thoroughly accounted for in the appreciation of your work . . .

Pfeiffer: You’re not off base at all. But then the question of the spectator’s identity is no small thing! Isn’t it one of the fundamental questions we’re facing in this moment of global reckoning? We’re coming full circle to the subject of infrastructure. We’re in a moment in which, for some people, things that have long been buried underground are being brought to the surface and scrutinized.

An analogy comes to mind relating to the methods of film and video postproduction. One of the primary operations that occurs in the film editing suite is synchronization, wherein different channels of sensory information are brought into alignment by the editor. For example, sound is synced to image, which is to say audio footage and video or film footage that were captured separately—often far apart from one another in location and time—are synced together, giving the impression of a unified whole from a single source. For example, the sound of a knock on the door is aligned with a close-up of a hand knocking on a door’s surface to create a unified impression of the gesture. This is done with the viewer in mind, knowing that to sync sound to image in this way streamlines the viewer’s reception and understanding of the scene. The point is to remove any disjunctions, gaps, or inconsistencies that would disrupt the intuitive flow of perception and cognition.

Syncing in this vein is fundamental to the post-production workflow, and mirrors a certain understanding of the way the brain works generally to process information. For me, the post-production editing suite is worth considering as a metaphor for reality itself in the age of social media. Instant by instant, the mind is at work processing bits of data from the different sense organs and synthesizing these fragments on the fly into unified objects. For example, a multitude of disparate sensations—the color red, round shape, smooth texture, sweet smell, sweet taste, crispy sound—come together in the mind as the thing we call apple. I’m borrowing this understanding of the nature of cognition from the field of emergence or systems theory. The way in which objects emerge from sense fragments can be applied to an understanding of the nature of memory, or the process of narration, or the formation of individual and group identities. None of these things pre-exist as unified wholes. They emerge through an aggregation of fragments in the mind of the perceiver.

In the editing suite, there’s a primary relationship between the spectacle under construction, the craft of the editor, and the identity of the spectator. Every editing decision, big or small, is made in anticipation of the way the viewer will receive the image and intuitively “get it.” In this way, the image, the editor, and the viewer are all counterparts in the process of creating meaning. None of these roles is passive. Spectators don’t just passively consume the spectacle, they are constituted or transformed by it. Conversely, the editor isn’t just making subjective decisions, but calibrating every nuance to a set of assumptions about who the spectator is and how they will receive their meaning. In this light, the 1966 World Cup is emblematic of the way a sporting event can be an exercise in nation-building—to repeat your formulation, the affect that seeks to bond recipients to their national image and the project of the white nation-state. To speak of flag-waving and national anthems sung before the game merely scratches the surface of the procedure. Its primary expression was the roar of the crowd as a hundred thousand fans exchanged chants and songs in support of England and West Germany barely a generation after WWII.

The introduction of the hired crowd of Filipino voices in an IMAX movie theater in Manila was meant to cut across the grain of the British nationalism permeating every aspect of the event in Wembley Stadium. What was essential to me in the remix was the incongruity of the doppelgänger multitude. As you point out, the relationship of the Filipino crowd to the found footage from 1966 remains unclear, even inscrutable. I thought of it as a kind of speculative time travel through a wormhole between two unrelated points in space and time through the illusion of synchronization, not unlike the knock on the door.

During the planning of The Saints, when I proposed the scheme to outsource the production of crowd sounds for the installation, the suggestion was made by the project’s commissioners to assemble the hired crowd in India because of the historical connection to the British Empire. I refused this suggestion in favor of the Philippines for multiple reasons, not the least of which was the lack of historical association. This gets to the heart of the question you asked about the identity of the spectator in relation to my work. New ontological models are emerging that serve to thoroughly deconstruct essentialist notions of identity aligned with the boundaries and authority of the white nation-state, along with the entitlements of citizenship for which it claims to stand. As we cross this threshold, what new understanding of subject formation will take its place? The Saints performs the vision of a form of subjectivity no longer compelled to come together as a unified whole.

This interview will be published in The Lives of Images, Volume 1: Repetition, Reproduction, and Circulation (Aperture, 2021), the first in a six-volume set of contemporary thematic readers.

Register for The Lives of Images Symposium Series (August 31–September 2), presented by Aperture and ICP, featuring conversations with Erika Balsom, Lucas Blalock, David Campany, Aria Dean, Jodi Dean, Paul Pfeiffer, Vivian Sobchack, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa.

From Rome to Disneyland, Catherine Wagner Finds “Clues” to Civilization

A giant marble head of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, seemingly wrested from a larger sculpture, sits on a pedestal. Both are encased in a narrow enclosure, a telephone booth–like stall that in turn is minimally braced by metal scaffolding. Around it are stone body parts, pieces of what was once was a complete sculpture of the man, enveloped in an irregular matrix of boxes that resembles an unfinished Eames shelving unit.

Catherine Wagner photographed Constantine Fragments (2014) at the Musei Capitolini in Rome, while she was in residence at the American Academy, and the picture elegantly breaks down concepts of power and history, literally into pieces. It is historical evidence captured in situ, broken yet organized and protected, however provisionally.

Catherine Wagner, Artemis / Diana, 2014

Wagner’s photography is consistently about foundations of culture, so it is fitting that her first solo show at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco would survey the core of her artistic inquiries. While the show covers a lot of ground—the photographs span four series from 1982 to 2014—Clues to Civilization is but one possible remix of her practice. The works from the different decades are arranged associatively, revealing a long-term project rather than discrete series.

“The foundation of the work is built from an idea about how knowledge is transferred and how we look at the times and culture in which we live, hence the title, Clues to Civilization,” Wagner told me recently, as we walked through the exhibition. I have a long relationship with Wagner, starting with her inclusion in a project-based, institutional critique group show I curated for the de Young Museum in 1999. We’ve been in dialogue about art and life ever since. She is gracious, hardworking, and a masterful and highly entertaining storyteller. Each of her photographs has a narrative within its carefully realized composition.

Catherine Wagner, Gendered House, 1995

Wagner’s mid-1990s Realism and Illusion series was the result of her rare behind-the-scenes access to international Disney theme parks. The project was commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where the work was first shown in 1997. “When I received the call, I said, I think you have the wrong person,” she said, referring to her unfamiliarity with the Americana aspect of Disney: Wagner’s father was German and her mother was from the Philippines; Wagner grew up in the Bay Area. “I’m from an immigrant family, my parents knew nothing about this as an American culture,” she said. “I’d never been to Disneyland. I came without that background that Disneyland was this happiness place.”

She approached the theme parks with a critical, conceptual lens, revealing the architectural, design, and cultural norms imparted by these corporately controlled fantasy lands. Southern California Landscape (1995), for example, shows a faux Alpine village on a reduced scale, with artificial snow–dusted mountains at the perimeter. Hovering over the scene in the background are life-size trees. “I was a kid in a candy store,” she said. “Not that I wanted to ride all the rides, but [I wanted] to be able to engage with the ways in which architecture was presenting itself.”

Nature is also built here, as in Japanese Elephants (1995), a black-and-white picture in which the animatronic pachyderms at Tokyo Disneyland have Hello Kitty–like grins. The color pigment print Tokyo Wildlife (1995) captures the blur of motion of more realistic looking animals. “My mom loved this piece because it reminded her of the Philippines,” Wagner said.

Catherine Wagner, Dream Kitchen, 1995

Like many artists, Wagner has been shifting her practice over the last year. “During the pandemic, I really started to look at my archive,” she said. In revisiting older works, she made the decision to present the pictures at a larger scale and with revised titles. In 1995, she printed Minnie Mouse’s Kitchen; Mickey’s Toontown, Disneyland, Anaheim, CA at a modest scale. In the current exhibition, the work is shown as a monumental 40-by-50-inch archival pigment print—more than twice its original size—and retitled Dream Kitchen. It’s a strategy that nudges towards expanded interpretations and a more elemental focus.

Catherine Wagner, “Pirouettes Turned My Life Around” (Creative Writing Class), 1986

This strategy is also effective in works from Wagner’s noted American Classroom series, begun in 1983 and originally printed on gelatin-silver paper. Here they are presented as new, crisp black-and-white pigment prints, again at a larger scale and with new titles focusing on subject matter—world maps, science experiments, and a desk densely etched with student scrawls. The last provides the witty title for “DH Lawrence Kicks Ass” (University Humanities Classroom) (1983–87). Wagner knows much about academic settings: she has been teaching at Mills College since 1987 and currently chairs the college’s art department.

Clues to Civilization includes works that Wagner made in Italy after she received the Rome Prize in 2013. Her fellowship resulted in photographs of antiquities in Roman museums that uphold historical gender codes. She points to two color pictures, Philosophers’ Hall and Emperors’ Hall (both 2014), each showing museum galleries filled with busts. “In Philosophers’ Hall, we see ‘great men,’ yet there isn’t a woman in it,” she said. “I walked over to another room where I see a presentation of a woman. They’re remembered in the wall didactics as ‘Busto Femenino,’ the bust of a woman, whereas the men would be titled their name.”

Catherine Wagner, “Optic Nerve” (7th Grade Science Room), 1983–87
All photographs courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

Such clues to civilization are evident in each series here. Most were made through opportunities to photograph internationally, in a range of culturally resonant sites, and in response to what she would find there. “I’m not shooting fast,” Wagner said. “None of this work is street photography, I’m either working with an 8-by-10 camera or extremely deliberately. There’s an athleticism to have to construct these ideas and carry them through in situ.” Seeing the career-spanning photographs offers a space to survey an artist’s aesthetic and conceptual strategies. “I work hard to make the photographs beautiful,” Wagner said. “Whether or not you are interested in this, beauty is the thing that pulls you in. Then you have to wrestle with what is there.”

Catherine Wagner: Clues to Civilization is on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, through August 14, 2021.

The Dazzling Black-and-White Photographs of India’s Premier Darkroom Artist

In the varied archive of O. P. (Om Prakash) Sharma, who has been practicing and teaching photography in India since the 1950s, human forms are inserted into labyrinths of geometric patterns, repeated in multiple postures across the photographic frame, and cast into eerie inversions of light and dark. In The Open Door (1968), a man leans against an unseen wall to speak more intimately with a quizzical child, making a motion of explanation with his right hand as his legs lean long across the framing rectangle. Transformed through Sharma’s methodical darkroom work, the conversing figures are enclosed in a maze of repetitive bands, an effect produced by creating a photogram and turning it into a black-and-white negative on high-contrast film.

O. P. Sharma, Twins, 1976

Sharma’s images are painstakingly produced, often with multiple layers of photograms, solarization, combined prints, or reflections that create dreamlike spaces. Even if these techniques sound impenetrably complicated and laborious, they are essential components of the Pictorialist’s tool kit. And, as is also often the case with Pictorialists, Sharma’s practice is difficult to pin down: it is forged out of many different themes, techniques, and visual vocabularies. He is as much a prominent portraitist as he is a darkroom alchemist, testing the limits of experimental processes such as multiple printings, photograms, and collage, while, occasionally, developing his own techniques, including a meticulous method for multiple solarization. “Pictorial photography is the mother of all branches of photography,” Sharma noted in a 2020 interview, declaring that its biggest contributors are amateurs “who spend their time, money, energy and their life to discover new things.”

O. P. Sharma, Far Away Look, 1990

By the mid-twentieth century, Pictorialism was considered passé in the United States and relegated to the terrain of the amateur. But South Asian practitioners such as J. N. Unwalla, A. L. Syed, and Sharma in India, along with Lionel Wendt in Sri Lanka, kept the style alive. That these bodies of work have only recently been revived in writings and histories of photography around the world speaks to the enduring power of the U.S. model for so-called photographic progression: even within India, as camerawork has gone through the global motions of modernism, photojournalism, and documentary, the country’s vast and prolific network of Pictorialists has remained under-addressed in the prevalent literature.

O. P. Sharma, Who is there, 1975

O. P. Sharma, The Open Door, 1968

Despite this near erasure of many successful practitioners in India, Sharma has been one of the country’s most enthusiastic proponents of the medium of photography. It was Sharma who wrote in the late 1980s to the Photographic Society of America and the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain requesting that August 19 be recognized as World Photography Day to mark the anniversary of the French government purchasing the patent for the daguerreotype in 1839. The first World Photography Day was celebrated in 1991, a likely result of Sharma’s personal efforts. Sharma, who was born in 1937, in Agra, moved to New Delhi in 1958, where he has been teaching photography ever since: at the Modern School from 1958 to 2000 and also, since 1980, heading the photography department at Triveni Kala Sangam, a prominent visual and performing arts institution. Sharma’s publications range from handy primers on the technical aspects of the camera to expositions on the oeuvres of Unwalla and Syed, his stylistic predecessors. In his many decades as an educator, Sharma will have taught hundreds, if not thousands, of students the intricacies of darkroom experimentation. Across his lifetime, his work has been shown in close to forty solo exhibitions, mostly in galleries and photographic societies in India as well as in the United States, Pakistan, and Norway.

O. P. Sharma, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, 1964
All photographs courtesy the artist

How are we to locate a practice as expansive as this?

Sharma’s work does not speak of South Asia as an empty photographic scene reliant on Europe and the United States for cues. It presents us with an active cosmopolitan global system of photography to which postcolonial photographers contributed localized visual languages, literature, and pedagogy. The range of Sharma’s influences—from the Armenian Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh to the Soviet Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, from Man Ray to Unwalla and Syed—is a testament to the cultural interconnectedness of this world. It does not pander to the primacy of New York as a photographic ground zero. To the contrary, it speaks to the preservation of darkroom experimentation in alternative geographies, where photographers such as Sharma have maintained the memory of photography as a careful, laborious, and tactile act of creation.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 243, “Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In,” under the title “Light Work.”

"The Lives of Images" Symposium Series

31 Aug 21 - 13:00

Donavon Smallwood and Bryan Schutmaat on "Languor"

5 Aug 21 - 19:00