Aperture's Blog, page 52

Book Signing with Ming Smith

1 Jul 21 - 17:00
Nicola Vassell Gallery
138 Tenth Avenue
New York

Why Lynn Hershman Leeson Is Always Ahead of Her Time

In a 1978 film called Lynn Turning into Roberta, the artist Lynn Hershman Leeson applies makeup to her face, sets a wig on her head, and gradually eases into the role of her fictitious persona and multiyear performance piece Roberta Breitmore (1972–79). Roberta rode buses around San Francisco, went to a psychiatrist, and had her own credit card. “Several times I left my house as Roberta, forgot something, and had to return in Roberta costume and makeup,” Hershman Leeson recalled of the years she spent enacting her alternate self, “which was a continual annoyance to my then eleven-year-old daughter.”

To say that Hershman Leeson was ahead of her time would be an understatement. A pioneer in performance, video, and multimedia art who throughout her life has probed the connections between technology and society, she recently converted her collected works into synthetic DNA. As early as 1980, in an interview with Nam June Paik, Hershman Leeson asked, “How long will it be before ordinary people supersede movie stars, and intercommunicative TV and computers supplant fictional film?”

During the 1970s and ’80s, while Hershman Leeson was redefining contemporary art, Eileen Myles was writing the stories that would be celebrated in her iconic 1994 book, Chelsea Girls, in which life becomes art and the body becomes poetry. “Nothing I said was forgettable,” Myles, who is also a photographer, has noted. “It was all designed to be remembered.” Here, for Aperture magazine’s “Orlando” issue, Hershman Leeson and Myles speak about past glories, present fame, and the long life of an artist.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Exorcism (Roberta Multiple, Michelle Larson, Being Transformed), 1978

Eileen Myles: Well, what should we talk about?

Lynn Hershman Leeson: I don’t know. It’s up to you.

Myles: I was thinking you would know.

Hershman Leeson: What they told me was that you were going to interview me, so I didn’t prepare anything.

Myles: This is very funny. See, I think they told me the same thing.

Hershman Leeson: [Laughs] Well, that makes sense. We could start with doubles.

Myles: What does “doubles” mean?

Hershman Leeson: Well, I once lived as another person for close to seven years. In the 1970s, I was trying to focus on the blurriness between fiction and reality, so I created a kind of fictional person. Her name, and the name of the project, was Roberta Breitmore. She had real artifacts, though, and a documented physical presence in the world. She saw a psychiatrist. She had an apartment. She had a driver’s license and checking accounts. And she put ads in the newspaper. I lived as this other character for almost a decade.

Myles: When you say she went to the psychiatrist, does that mean you went to the psychiatrist under her name?

Hershman Leeson: Yeah, as her. She was blonde; I wasn’t. She had a particular taste. She had a certain way of walking and speaking; she had her own language—it was English, but it was her language, not mine.

Myles: Did you create a different psyche?

Hershman Leeson: I did. She had a different background. She was younger than I was. She went to therapy because she was broke and lonely and kept having negative experiences. I have her psychiatric record from the psychiatrist who treated her.

I didn’t know it would last seven years, but when you start to define how you make somebody real, she needs to be fleshed out and have a history. In fact, she’s more real than I am, because I couldn’t get credit cards, and I couldn’t get other artifacts of life and the records that she easily acquired. So for me, it was kind of just living her life.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta’s Body Language Chart, 1976

Myles: How did you choose a therapist for her?

Hershman Leeson: I found somebody who was an expert in schizophrenia; he was also an art collector.

Myles: So he knew what was going on?

Hershman Leeson: Not really, because nobody had ever done anything like that. I told him that a friend of mine needed to see him, and I didn’t explain what it was, because I didn’t really know. In the early 1970s, nobody used the words performance or endurance performance or anything like that, so everything was kind of a test.

Myles: How did the performance end? Why did it end? And how did you feel afterward?

Hershman Leeson: This character, Roberta, kept having very negative experiences. I wanted to invert that. At the end of nearly a decade, I felt that she had enough substance of reality to prove that she actually was a fiction that became real. I ended her with an exorcism in Lucrezia Borgia’s crypt in Ferrara, Italy. There were dancers who could move like her; I brought one of them to Ferrara, and she did a performance at the Palazzo dei Diamanti where she took Roberta Construction Chart #1 (1975) and an effigy off the museum wall and set them on fire. She—the Roberta multiple—lay in state for twenty-four hours while the museum filled with smoke from the burning ashes of Roberta’s history. I felt that she was kind of like a phoenix, and when she surfaced again, she wouldn’t be such a victim.

Myles: Does she surface?

Hershman Leeson: She does. But she doesn’t surface as the original Roberta, rather as a mutation. For instance, CYBEROBERTA (1993–95) was born. She was a telerobotic doll with two eyes that were cameras. One captured what she saw in the room she was in, the other captured images and posted them on the Internet, and from the Internet you could turn her head 180 degrees. It was like a nanny cam, but about a decade pre–nanny cam. The doll is a miniature replica of Roberta. I resized Roberta’s clothes with a seamstress so they would fit the doll, I sent photographs to the doll maker to make her look like Roberta, and I had little glasses and all the artifacts that were hers replicated, but in miniature. And then, in 2018, I made an antibody with a scientist, Dr. Thomas Huber at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Basel, that had Roberta’s name on it and was called erta. There’s also a lynn hershman antibody, and there’s a roberta breitmore antibody— because I thought it was appropriate, since she no longer had a body.

Roberta was/is a mirror of her culture. The images are the remains of her life, in nonhierarchical form, with surveillance photographs, her replacement at work, the button she lost from her coat, all of which comprise the varying series she endured becoming herself. Almost two hundred images and documents. She was meant not only to demolish the barriers of definitions of theater, literature, and photography, but was also meant to blur the very nature of reality set as a simulation in real time. When one looks through the artifacts and remains of her life now, some forty years later, it is as if they are reperforming or re-embodying her.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Roberta Getting Ready to Go to Work, 1975

Myles: When you stopped, what was the effect on you?

Hershman Leeson: I think that it was a beginning of my own journey toward nonvictimization and healing. It was a vehicle through which I understood that there’s more than one victim in our culture. People can revive themselves into a new dimension or perceptions by looking at new choices, so that when they become seventy-two, they might finally get discovered, because their options aren’t so constrained. And that’s exactly what happened to me.

Myles: So tell me about your discovery at seventy-two.

Hershman Leeson: All my life people said that what I did wasn’t art. Then about four years ago, a curator in Germany, Peter Weibel, offered to do a show and a book of my work, not realizing how much of it had never been shown. The exhibition was at ZKM, in Karlsruhe, and was called Civic Radar (2014); it included eight hundred artworks. People realized that the previously unexhibited work anticipated many ideas from 1966 on, and that many other people had been credited for doing the work I originated. Finally, my work was noticed—or you could say “discovered.” It absolutely changed my life’s trajectory. The unintended consequences of that show were that it got me out of debt and it gave me a kind of recognition that had always eluded me.

Myles: How does the “double” play out in the series Hero Sandwich (1981–84)?

Hershman Leeson: Those photographs were created by crossing negatives of easily obtainable publicity photographs of media heroes in a way in which either the male or female dominated. The male/female images of stars were cross-pollinated, so to speak, by “sandwiching” the negatives, manipulating the outcome, and reprinting the result several times. Each work from Hero Sandwich is generally composed of a male and female pair, not necessarily from the same time period. The overlapping imagery focuses on common gestures or intentions that reflect media strategies responsible for producing these “heroes.” Individual identities surrender to artificial personas. During the process of creating these photographs, I felt like I was working in Gregor Mendel’s garden, seeing what would emerge from shifting domination, a kind of image genetics that created varying strains of recombination.

Myles: Photographs feel like a double in a way writing never does, unless it’s simply how writing a story makes the person themself— the author, I mean—kind of redundant. Since I use my own life frequently in my work, I sometimes get that glazed-over look from people because the “I” of my book has already told them “that” before. It’s like I’m in a long-term relationship with everybody. But photographs just kind of hang out there in the world.

When my show poems (2018–19) was up at Bridget Donahue, in New York, I didn’t know where to put my body. I missed my opening because I was on a book tour for my new poetry collection, Evolution (2018), and we kept going back and forth about whether we should tell people through the press release that I wouldn’t be at the opening. How much am I a part of the work? Writing is all about the body, to my mind. As long as you’re not dead, people want to see the author.

Years ago, I gave a talk with a slideshow in Germany. Well, actually, I missed that too, but that’s another story. But my intention was to give a talk with all these pictures flashing behind me. The lecture was called “The Poet’s Body.” I was feeling very sad at the time I was putting that piece together, and the last line of the talk was, “My tears have turned into pictures, my tears have turned into pictures.” The show that you saw in New York was like all these flickers, like you were passing things on a train: purple drink, view from bed in my apartment, the line of the train in Marfa.

Hershman Leeson: Who published Chelsea Girls (1994)?

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Myles: Ha. I did not count on you knowing my work. Black Sparrow Press did; then HarperCollins published it the second time around, in 2015. That’s how I got “famous.” The line was, “Underground dyke poet makes big.” The thing that’s funny is that it was always my plan—to be mainstream at this point in my life.

I meant it as a film. I also thought of it as all these ways of being female. I was in a new life; I come from a long line of alcoholics and addicts, and I had stopped all that. I was a clear- eyed poet. So my capacity to project myself into a place where I had been at some other point in my life—tales of my own drunkenness, young memories before I could articulate them— became interesting and desirable. The chapters were like little movies, because I always wanted to make films. The book itself was me transitioning from being a poet into being a fiction writer—and back, of course. I don’t trust staying away from poetry too long. It’s my water.

Interestingly, I just made my first actual film in Marfa, called The Trip (2019), with David Fenster; he shot it on Super 8. It’s a road film with puppets, but the puppets aren’t just any puppets—I made them when I was nine. We took them on this glorious road trip between Marfa and Alpine, Texas. Yet the narrative that arose wound up being very emotional. The same old alcoholic family was suddenly also along for the ride.

Chelsea Girls went out of print someplace in the aughts when Black Sparrow ceased, and I just decided that I was going to let it stay out of print until I could do it with someone good. And when it did come out again, I had a boom. It was almost a joke. In the fall of 2015, I think the New York Times wrote about me four or five times. People were like, “Again?” Poets were pretty great about it, like I was taking one for the team. But by now, since I am female and queer, I sort of get the feeling I’m supposed to vanish into my fame in some way. In 2016, I was even in that part of The New York Times Magazine where they ask you twenty questions. Then it was how Eileen spends her Sunday night. What’s great about publicity is the self you build out there. I told them I masturbate on Sunday night—doesn’t everybody? I thought the point of a public body is to say what the public body never says. Especially a female.

Actually, I wanted the show at Bridget’s to invisibilize my book release. Books are so heavy, and photographs are so quick and light. Like a film. Passing.

Eileen Myles, –, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

Hershman Leeson: Do you see any correlation between your writing and your photographs?

Myles: They are the same. I’ve always thought of my writing as visual art, so photography is just making something manifest that was already there in another form. I’ve been taking pictures since I was a kid. Earliest was trick photography. I staged crimes at home and caught them on film. Mostly I was interested in making legends; now I like things trapped in time, dazzling in some way. I think the best you can do is create discomfort. It’s so real. I suppose that is why I like taking photographs. My career is so unrelentingly queer, but my photographs are not queer … though the world is queer. Get out there and walk around; it’s undeniable. It’s queer and falling apart.

I’m sixty-nine—it’s such a joke, a dirty joke before seventy. The thing that’s great about aging is that something is retiring. My forties were a struggle. I was doing performance art; I was writing art reviews; I was writing poems. And I was writing the stories that would become Chelsea Girls. It was a very constructive decade. I ran for president in my forties, and an enormous part of it was an enormous construction of self and feeling. If at thirty-nine I felt like an exhausted old poet, I would nonetheless at forty and forty-one be a young presidential candidate. It was truly endurance performance art. If you want to endure something, run for president. It’s horrible. Honestly, before I ran for president, I was famous for being poor; running for president really blew my life out of scale entirely. I was a wreck after that. I was always a figure in my poems, but now I was a figure in the world. Big in the way you could be big in the 1990s—on MTV, written up in art magazines, touring in twenty- eight states. For years people were stopping me at ATMs.

Didn’t you run for president?

Hershman Leeson: I created a virtual character that ran for president in 2004. Her name was DiNA, and she ran for tele-president. She was running against George W. Bush, and her platform was “Artificial intelligence is better than no intelligence.” But alas, she also didn’t win.

Myles: That’s a very good platform. Mine was “Total disclosure.”

Hershman Leeson: That’s why you didn’t win.

Myles: I know. A presidential candidate is supposedly creating an other self, and I was using my actual self, which was kind of like used material. I think they prefer it if you come up with something new.

A couple of years ago, Amazon optioned Chelsea Girls for a movie. I was hired as the screenwriter. When I was a young poet and imagining what my life later on would be, I had this idea that writers, if they were lucky, would all go and sell out to Hollywood and become rich, and that was my plan. Back in the 1970s, when I was deliberately being dramatic and sick of shitty jobs, I went and sold my blood one day for, like, six dollars. It was an awful experience, and I freaked out; they told me never to come back there because I truly had a panic attack. There were these two old maroon plastic couches you laid down on, and they hooked me up, and I could see my blood pouring out of my body into this big sack. There was this old street guy next to me, lying there, who clearly did this every week. He was lying there very calmly, and I was just freaking the fuck out. I just couldn’t handle it. And they were so mad at me. I took my six dollars, and I remember going next door and buying a ginger ale—and then it was down to around two dollars—and I was writing a poem on a napkin about how when I was a rich screenwriter in LA I would think about this day when I sold my blood.

Eileen Myles, it’s absinthe, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York

Hershman Leeson: Anyway, we fulfilled our dreams.

Myles: Exactly. This kind of hard touring, which probably both of us have been doing for the past years, is very literally selling your blood. Right?

Hershman Leeson: Yeah.

Myles: I mean, that’s why I want to stop. It’s like my body is like a candle and I am burning it, and this is not what I want to do.

Hershman Leeson: Like the world becomes a vampire, and you have to endure this bloodletting to survive. And it seems, in a particular way, too, about being female. It might be that men seem to understand boundaries better and don’t let this systemic leakage happen. I think as a female artist, and also as an artist who has gotten more attention later in life, I am like a broken machine that says yes to any opportunity. I am only now realizing that there is another machine inside of me that finally is learning how to say no. Once you jump-start the second machine, it becomes kind of addictive. Saying no gives you a lot more power than saying yes.

Myles: Totally.

Hershman Leeson: Just being able to hear things in a different way than you do when you’re overcommitted, as luxurious as being overcommitted is. Wasn’t it Tennessee Williams who, when his play opened on Broadway and was a big success, wasn’t able to write because they were putting him up at a fancy hotel with room service? Eventually, he moved down to Mexico to some little dumpy place so that he could find out who he was again and start to write. The same thing happened to Francis Bacon. They actually destroyed his studio and got him a nice, clean, new one, and he couldn’t paint in it. They had to rebuild the old one so that he could work again.

Myles: That’s hysterical. My whole life on Instagram is just documenting my studio, which is mostly my apartment. But also walking down the street, collecting stuff. It’s like the inside of the head, whether it’s inside the apartment or inside the subway or inside the airport.

We’re in such a funny moment technologically, because we can share all those in-between stages, or the permanently present one of where we are, with so many people so swiftly. It’s this very godly feeling. It’s disgusting, and then very beautiful. It’s a little bit like dying all the time.

Hershman Leeson: Yes. That’s sort of what I was trying to find out with Roberta’s psychiatrist. I wanted to know more about collective trauma, or a connective trauma that we’re all dealing with, because we are all connected through DNA and just from being alive at this time. I recently completed a project, The Infinity Engine (2006–18), that was modeled after a genetics lab, and I was able to convert all the work and research I had done for the last thirty-four years, including some of my films, into DNA itself.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Room #8 – Lynn Hershman DNA and Lynn Hershman Antibody (detail), 2018
All photographs by Hershman Leeson courtesy Bridget Donahue, New York, and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco

Myles: Wow.

Hershman Leeson: It wouldn’t have been possible before this year, because they just developed this technique. George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and an expert on synthetic biology, worked with Technicolor and Microsoft to create technology that enabled this process. I look at it as a kind of expanded cinema, because you have to put all of the information on a time line, one frame at a time, and they convert it to zeros and ones at the micromolecular level and store it as synthetic DNA, which has a life span of a million years, rather than fifty, which is what most films have.

Myles: The very gesture itself is so anti-storage. How big is it?

Hershman Leeson: They put it in a tiny test tube. It’s about two inches by a half inch. My entire life fits in this tiny thing that’s practically invisible. I carry it in my wallet.

Myles: It’s so beautiful. It’s like a crazy, insane, microscopic retrospective.

Hershman Leeson: Exactly. A simmering essence. A haiku of being. Myles: Right? Or a fossil.

Hershman Leeson: [Laughs] Exactly.

This article was originally published in Aperture, issue 235, “Orlando,” under the title “The Double.”

Family Fun Days at Fotografiska NY

29 Aug 21 - 10:00
Fotografiska NY
281 Park Ave S
New York

Celebrating "I’m Looking Through You" with Tim Davis and Sarah Bay Gachot

29 Jun 21 - 19:00

Family Fun Day at Fotografiska NY

27 Jun 21 - 10:00
Fotografiska NY
281 Park Ave S
New York

Photo No-Nos Online Variety Show

24 Jun 21 - 19:00

The Photographers Crafting Visionary Narratives of the African Diaspora

In May 1803, a slave ship bound for St. Simons Island, off the coast of Georgia, neared its final destination. On board were seventy-five captives belonging to the Igbo peoples of West Africa. As the ship approached the island, the Igbo rose up in revolt, forcing the white crew to jump overboard, running the vessel aground. On land, according to a contemporary account, the Igbos “took to the swamp.” Rather than risk being returned to captivity, they lined up hand in hand and walked into the water where many of them drowned.

Variations on the story of the Africans who found liberation through suicide have been told over successive generations across the Atlantic world, from the United States to South America and the Caribbean. In the process, the tale has taken on the resonant power of myth. Some versions have the Igbos returning to Africa by walking on the waves or along the seabed. Others describe them taking to the sky and soaring back to their homeland. Echoes of the story can also be heard in popular culture. It is the base material for Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon and Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust. Beyoncé references it in a scene in her Lemonade film. And in Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan’s character, Erik Killmonger, alludes to the tale with his dying words: “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ’cause they knew death was better than bondage.”

Adama Delphine Fawundu, Black Gold of the Sun, Lagos, 2018
Courtesy the artist

Real-life events turned folklore, such as the story of the Igbo slaves, along with myths, legends, and spiritual beliefs drawn more widely from the history and culture of the African diaspora, have increasingly become a powerful source of inspiration for Black artists and creative figures. A trio of recent photographic projects illustrates renewed attention to these stories.

Ayana V. Jackson’s series Take Me to the Water (2019) is inspired by mythological African water deities such as Mami Wata and Olokun, spirits venerated in Africa and the diaspora for their power to heal and liberate those who summon them. In addition to African legends, Jackson’s project draws on the fable of a Black Atlantis created by Drexciya, the enigmatic 1990s Detroit techno duo. In the group’s telling of it, Drexciya is also the name of a colony located on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean populated by the descendants of pregnant African women thrown overboard from slave ships. The women’s fetuses learned to breathe through the embryonic fluid of their mothers’ wombs and were born able to live underwater. In Jackson’s pictures, the Drexciyans craft their clothes from human detritus: a bodice of spoons, a skirt of flip-flops, a veil of black netting. But they are defiant, noble creatures, glorious proof of how Black life might have flourished without the depredations of the slave trade.

Similarly, the artist Adama Delphine Fawundu merges myth, memory, and spiritual belief in her photography-based multimedia project Sacred Star of Isis (2017–ongoing). Fawundu’s family origins lie in Sierra Leone, and in the series, she invokes the presence of West African deities such as Mami Wata while photographing herself in Argentina, upstate New York, and other locations where her forebears were scattered by slavery. These works suggest the possibility of new narratives and networks that can be formed from traditional myths and beliefs despite the efforts of the slave trade to sunder Africans from the heritage of their homelands.

Lina Iris Viktor, Eleventh, 2017–18, from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred
Courtesy Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago

Lina Iris Viktor draws from African cosmologies as well as Aboriginal dream paintings and other sources of Indigenous and non-Western myths and beliefs in her art. Viktor was raised in London by Liberian parents who were forced to flee the country amid civil war in the 1980s. The dazzling, gold-embossed pictures of her series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred (2018) offer a mythological history of the country, conjuring Liberia as an uneasy utopia, both a paradise lost and a cautionary tale about the pathology of colonization.

In their shared tendency to blend historical fact and lyrical folklore, and to juxtapose the spiritual, the supernatural, and science fiction, we might usefully group the art of Jackson, Fawundu, and Viktor under the heading of the “Black fantastic,” works of speculative fiction that draw from history and myth to conjure new visions of African diasporic culture and identity. The scholar Rosemary Jackson describes the “fantastic” as a form that reaches beyond the boundaries of realism and dispenses with “rigid distinctions between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death.” The fantastic, she writes, “has to do with inverting elements of this world, re-combining its constitutive features in new relations to produce something strange, unfamiliar, and apparently ‘new,’ absolutely ‘other’ and different.”

The Black fantastic shares terrain with genres such as Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism, artistic realms with their own expansive takes on Black experience. But to my mind, the Black fantastic is less a movement or a rigid category than a way of seeing shared by artists who grapple with the legacy of slavery and the inequities of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility. The roots of the Black fantastic emerge from pioneering authors, musicians, and filmmakers of the 1960s and ’70s such as Octavia E. Butler, Henry Dumas, Amos Tutuola, Sun Ra, and Ousmane Sembène. But a raft of prodigiously talented contemporary practitioners is now taking the lead, among them the artist Wangechi Mutu, the novelist N. K. Jemisin, and musicians such as Solange and Kamasi Washington.

Juliana Huxtable, Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), 2015
Courtesy the artist and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Art Resource, New York

This perspective stretches from, say, the enigmatic tableaux of the South African artist Mohau Modisakeng, whose Land of Zanj images (2019) are rich with historical allusion, to the explorations of race, gender, and queer sexuality conducted by the likes of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Mickalene Thomas with her 2019 Orlando series made for this magazine, and Juliana Huxtable with her 2013 Nuwaubian Nation photographs. In those latter images, Huxtable inserts herself into digitally rendered landscapes inspired by the Nuwaubian Nation, an African American religious sect whose credo borrows from Islam, ancient Egypt, and stories of alien visits to Earth. Huxtable, who describes the portraits as “self-imaginings,” depicts herself as an otherworldly, green-skinned being, a figure whose very form critiques existing social norms and categorical distinctions while gesturing to alternate, more mutable states of identity.

But why are so many figures being drawn to art that ostensibly seeks to escape from, rather than contend with, the long history of anti-Black racism in the West, especially in the era of Black Lives Matter and the international protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd?

The success of Marvel movies and television shows including Stranger Things and Game of Thrones, to name just two, makes clear that fantasy is a dominant cultural language of our times. One of the unanticipated consequences of the superhero and sci-fi boom is that it has given space for Black artists to explore Black life in ways that are more allusive and audacious than hitherto possible. For example, the dazed and sardonic tone characteristic of recent shows and movies such as Us, Atlanta, Get Out, and Sorry to Bother You can surely be taken as a response to the horror and absurdity of a world in which Black people can be harassed, arrested, or killed while going bird-watching, cycling, jogging, or lying asleep in bed at night.

Isaac Julien, Place des Cineastes – Roundabout, 2005, from the series Fantôme Créole
Courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery

Fundamental to the Black fantastic is a skepticism about the claim that modern liberal democracies are built on ideals of tolerance, rationality, and equality. Those values feel profoundly flawed in their application when you consider how the wealth and advancement of the West were built on four hundred years of the slave trade, and how the intellectually and morally corrupt arguments of racial hierarchy used to justify slavery still poison our societies today. Artists working from the perspective of the Black fantastic are intent on both critiquing Western notions of progress and, in riposte, offering counterimages of Black imaginative reach.

The British Guyanese artist Hew Locke has had a long fascination with the role that public monuments play in the formation of Western cultural identity. For the past two decades, he has been photographing statues of prominent historical figures from Queen Victoria to Edward Colston, the slave trader whose bronze effigy was recently toppled by Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol. Locke then embellishes the pictures with objects, creating elaborate fetish figures whose often-problematic relationships to race and empire are now made visible. For his 2018 New York–based iteration of this project, he reworked the statues of public figures such as George Washington, Peter Stuyvesant, and J. Marion Sims. Each of the men he selected benefited from slavery or the exploitation of people of color, and in covering them with totems and tchotchkes, Locke reveals what their power was built on. An illustration by William Blake of a slave being tortured dangles from the forearm of Washington, a reminder that the United States’ first president owned over one hundred souls.

Kiluanji Kia Henda, Icarus 13, Astronomy Observatory, Namibe Desert, 2007
© the artist and courtesy Galleria Fonti, Naples

By contrast to such brutal and dispiriting histories, some of the still photographs from Isaac Julien’s 2005 film installation Fantôme Créole depict a legacy of cultural renewal in late twentieth-century Africa. In the 1960s and ’70s, nation after nation in Africa secured independence from colonial rule. The optimism of liberation triggered a creative flourishing across the arts of Africa and the diaspora, from the novels of Chinua Achebe and the photography of Malick Sidibé to the films of Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo. Julien’s images capture some of the thrilling, futuristic structures inspired by that period. Built in the 1980s, the Place des Cinéastes, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, for example, a towering monument of shapes representing stacks of film reels, telephoto lenses, and other camera equipment, is an homage to the country’s independence- era role as the heart of filmmaking in Africa. Julien confines his study to Burkina Faso, but across the continent, you can find buildings of similarly audacious design. Ghana’s flying saucer–like International Trade Fair Centre, in Accra, and the extraordinary La Pyramide commercial center in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, speak to a shared desire to break free of European aesthetic strictures in favor of an exhilarating architecture of freedom and the fantastic.

Visionary architecture also plays a key role in the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Icarus 13 series from 2007. The project purports to document Angola’s first space mission, complete with images of a spectacular rocket launch from mission control in Luanda. The photographs are imaginary, courtesy of the artist, who creates what have been described as “pliable fictions.” But the settings are real. A dome-shaped cinema from the independence period doubles as an astronomical observatory, while the towering mausoleum for Angola’s former leader Agostinho Neto becomes a sleek rocket headed to the stars.

With works such as Julien’s and Kia Henda’s in mind, we can think of the Black fantastic as a project of liberation. For much of the history of Western thought, the peoples of the African diaspora have functioned as a synonym for the primitive and perpetually underdeveloped. Writing in the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel dismissed the continent as “enveloped in the dark mantle of Night,” its people only representative of “natural man in his completely wild and untamed state.” Even today to talk of Africa, or the culture, myths, and beliefs that have spread from there across the Atlantic world, is to invoke the antithesis of Western modernity. In collapsing distinctions between fact and fiction, science and the supernatural, the Black fantastic also dissolves the false connection between Blackness and backwardness. Instead, it makes clear that belonging to the African diaspora means being a participant in a shared endeavor of artistic imagining and world making that stretches back hundreds of years into the past and reaches always into the future.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 241, “Utopia,” under the title “The Black Fantastic.”

Sunil Gupta’s Vision for a Queer Politics of Belonging

On November 26, 1982, the Guardian, in its Third World Review section, ran a piece with the startling headline “They Dare Not Speak Its Name in Delhi: Sunil Gupta on the Secret Suffering of India’s Homosexual Community.” At the time, being gay in India was still illegal, as decreed by Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, instituted in 1861 during the British rule of India. “One of the best kept secrets in India is the practice of homosexuality, although there is no lack of practitioners from all social classes,” Gupta writes, noting the constant “fear of discovery” and that Indian society “requires the individual to dedicate his/her life to presenting a conventional puritanical public image.” Accompanying the concise text is a single black-and-white image taken by Gupta, picturing a lone man in a kurta, his face cropped from the frame and his body angled away from the camera toward the gardens of the grand Mughal mausoleum Humayun’s Tomb.

Gupta, who was born in New Delhi, immigrated with his family to Canada in 1969, at the age of fifteen. Having aspirations of being a social-justice photographer in the mode of W. Eugene Smith, he traveled back to India in 1980, receiving a student award from Thames Television to document poverty in the rural Ajmer district of Rajasthan. While transiting through Delhi, Gupta, who had come out by the age of seventeen in Montreal, was curious about urban gay life there and wanted to take some pictures. He quickly realized through a friend, the historian Saleem Kidwai, that a gay underground did exist and that to connect with it all that was needed was “one telephone number.” It was “all word of mouth,” Gupta told me last year. “No one wanted to be in a picture.” Gupta was staggered by how men had accommodated themselves to this situation, where it was not polite “in a Delhi drawing room” to discuss living an out gay life. Frustrated, Gupta made some staged photographs that imagined anonymous men purportedly cruising in various locations around Delhi. The image reproduced in the Guardian comes from this group of fewer than ten gelatin-silver prints that, until recently, were rarely exhibited or published, and were later christened as Towards a Gay Indian Image (1982).

Sunil Gupta, Towards an Indian Gay Image, Lake Pichola, Udaipur, 1983

Unlike the other bodies of work that Gupta had in his portfolio at the time, either straightforward photojournalism or personal photography projects, these images were conceptually driven. They are constructed photographs, with Delhi not merely a backdrop for the experiences of the gay men Gupta directed but a subject itself. Gupta was aware that gay men navigate a city with a distinct agenda driven by searching for a partner or lover. He marked gardens of historical monuments in Delhi as furtive destinations for these men, who, in those unaccounted hours between when work would end at five o’clock and dinner was served at seven, stepped outside their domestic, conventional family lives to have a casual tryst.

For ethical reasons, Gupta decided against simply taking documentary pictures of men who were actually cruising at these locations, as it was “too revealing of people who did not want to be seen.” Instead, he insisted on the visual presence of historical landmarks, recalling a strain of nineteenth-century colonial photography that exulted in the beauty of archaeological sites often evacuated of people, effectively erasing all indications of the society in which they existed. (A rare documentary image of gay subjects, looking out at a lake, which Gupta made from an elevated vantage point in Udaipur, was later used for the cover of Jeremy Seabrook’s 1998 book, Colonies of the Heart.) By explicitly foregrounding and orienting the bodies of his volunteers, either alone or in pairs, their gazes averted from the camera toward these monuments, Gupta inverts and refutes this historical gesture of erasure, expressly confirming the presence of these men and the culture of cruising that was a part of the fabric of Delhi.

Sunil Gupta, India Gate, 1987, from the series Exiles

These experimental pictures are the natural precursors to Gupta’s better-known series Exiles, which he shot from 1986 to 1987. Gupta, who was living in London at the time, returned to India to make photographs at cruising sites. He actively tried to involve the men who volunteered as subjects, printing contact sheets in London and sharing them to ensure that he had their consent to print the photographs, with the understanding that the images would not be shown at the time in India. As an art student, Gupta had not seen any representations of gay Indian men in art, as if, he recalled, “there were no gay Indians.” He was not interested in the casual homosocial interactions visible on the streets of the country that the photographer William Gedney sensitively captured during his two trips to India, in 1969 and 1979. “Exiles was about locating Indian cis men in an international gay landscape,” Gupta told me. “I was very keen that my subjects were explicitly gay men, that the images showed such men for the historical record. We were there.”

Sunil Gupta, Nehru Park, 1987, from the series Exiles

The geography of Exiles is more expansive: Gupta traversed Delhi, photographing in color. Each image is accompanied by a caption that states the location followed by a few lines from recorded conversations Gupta had with assorted men. The texts do not correspond to the images directly but are drawn instead from disparate thoughts and reflections. One reads, “It must be marvelous for you in the West with your bars, clubs, gay liberation and all that.” Another says, “I am tired of being alone with no prospect of meeting anyone I like. I’m nauseated by the party and park scene.” By contrast, “I love this part of town. It’s got such character and you can have sex just walking in the crowd.” AIDS is mentioned in one caption, but Gupta notes that while there was awareness about the illness in Delhi, “it seemed very distant . . . and everyone thought it was a uniquely American problem”—a situation that was compounded by the Indian Health Ministry’s prolonged public dismissal of the disease.

The hesitancies, anxieties, struggles, and curiosities of men in Delhi portrayed in Exiles offer a stark contrast to Gupta’s own personal experiences in the West. A decade earlier, in 1976, Gupta was standing on street corners in downtown New York taking the photographs that now make up his celebrated series Christopher Street. These gay men were, as he says, “dressed up and showing off.” Confidently, they stride by, unabashedly wanting to be seen, their demonstrative sense of self appearing in direct opposition to the faceless protagonists of Exiles. Christopher Street has received a belated adulatory reception, with a 2019 exhibition and an accompanying book.

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Work from Exiles was publicly exhibited for the first time in 1987, as part of The Body Politic: Re-Presentations of Sexuality at the Photographers’ Gallery, London. As Gupta describes it, the work just “sank.” Despite the curator’s attempts to be inclusive, there seemed to be no interest in material from beyond the West. Finally, in 2004, Gupta showed Exiles, along with three other bodies of work, in New Delhi, at the India Habitat Centre, as a belated, affirmative homecoming. In the intervening decades, things had begun to change for LGBTQIA Indians: Shortly after Gupta completed Exiles, the AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan (AIDS Anti-Discrimination Movement, known as ABVA), the first HIV/AIDS activist organization in India, was founded in 1988, in Delhi. In 1991, ABVA published Less Than Gay, a groundbreaking report demanding the repeal of all discriminatory legislation singling out homosexual acts by consenting adults in private, including Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. While the first petition was unsuccessful, throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, the battle for LGBTQIA rights continued, with the establishment of newer organizations and collectives and with more reporting in the mainstream media.

Gupta encountered this shift in attitude during the run of his 2004 exhibition at Habitat. The curator Radhika Singh had organized complementary movie screenings, and she invited two organizations to participate, including a queer student group based at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The following year, Gupta returned to India, noting that he wanted “to become part of the changing face of Delhi. And to reconnect with a long-lost gay childhood.”

Sunil Gupta, Akash, 2012, from the series Mr Malhotra’s Party
All photographs by Sunil Gupta © the artist/DACS and courtesy Hales Gallery, New York; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto; and Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi

Energized, Gupta started working on a new, strikingly different series of portraits, each made on the streets of Delhi. This time, the subjects faced the camera unfazed, calm, resolute, and self-assured within the melee of the city. The people in these photographs—from an extended network of young people he began to spend time with in South Delhi—want to be seen, and, as Gupta noted, are “‘real’ people who identify their sexuality as ‘queer’ in some way.” The title Mr Malhotra’s Party (2007) is a reference to Pegs ’N’ Pints, a local nightclub that held a gay night every week, even though signs posted outdoors advertised a private party under a fictitious person’s name, a subversion of Section 377. The moniker Gupta chose for the host of his “party” was Mr. Malhotra.

Exiles and Mr Malhotra’s Party are, in fact, twinned projects. Gupta was no longer confronted with the clandestine lives of gay men. Instead, the people pictured in Mr Malhotra’s Party assert that they are not disembodied subjects, their forthright presence a testament to the urgent need to contest prejudice and intolerance. Between these two bodies of work, a transit is captured from the isolated, invisible, and private to the collectively proud, visible, and public. As the writer and activist Gautam Bhan has noted, “Cities belong to different publics, no single identity, no single way of life, no one sense of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ can dominate a metropolis. It is in such a city that sexuality could, should, must be able to take its different paths, where it can reach for dignity rather than a bare life.” Bhan wrote these words in 2017, in a dark time, when the 2009 ruling by the Delhi High Court that had struck down portions of Section 377 as unconstitutional had, in 2013, been overturned by India’s Supreme Court.

As the mood shifted, Gupta recalled, from “euphoria to gloom,” he began work on Delhi: Communities of Belonging (2016), a collaborative venture with his husband, Charan Singh, whom he met in 2009 at an HIV/AIDS-awareness community gathering in Delhi. Approached by a U.S. publisher to develop a book on queer life in India, Gupta and Singh focused their efforts on Delhi, photographing seventeen subjects in their homes and workplaces. The pictures are softer, quieter, and at times banal, and read as a sequence of nonintrusive glances. These images reveal how individuals and couples have negotiated and built worlds for themselves, which they inhabit fully without shame. Passages of text accompany the suite of photographs, and, unlike the chorus- like captions of Exiles, they are accounts of the subjects’ lives in their own words. Finally, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled that the application of Section 377 was unconstitutional, calling it “irrational, indefensible and manifestly arbitrary.”

Anoop Ray, Untitled, Noida, 2010, from the series Friends and Their Friends
Courtesy the artist

“Sunil has been a key advocate for photographers of color and queer photographers throughout his expansive career,” says Mark Sealy, the director of Autograph ABP, a photography space in London, who curated Gupta’s 2020 retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery. “His work should be viewed primarily through the lens of an activist—one who understands fully what it means to live in a world full of intolerance and hatred.” A younger generation of photographers across India, whose work is confident, unflinching, and hot, has unequivocally taken up these concerns that Gupta pioneered.

Pulkit Mogha’s 100 Nudes project (2019) has amassed scores of amateur nude selfies voluntarily sent in by South Asian men. Roshini Kumar’s series Bad Company: The Secret Lives of Good Girls (2018) imagines an underground world of unbridled female pleasure, with women exploring the limits of their sexuality. Others have taken a more localized, quasi-documentarian approach: Sandeep T K, Indu Antony, and Soham Gupta have photographed the transgender communities of Kerala, Bangalore, and Kolkata, respectively. Members of the LGBTQIA community in eastern India are pictured in Soumya Sankar Bose’s elegant group of moody portraits Full Moon on a Dark Night (2014–ongoing), in which the sitters are swathed by inky black shadows, metaphorically attesting to the psychological traumas they have suffered because of persecution and marginalization.

Soumya Sankar Bose, Howrah, 2016, from the series Full Moon on a Dark Night
Courtesy the artist

“Today, there is a great explosion of queer photographers and photography in a way that was not possible not so long ago. It has also become diverse in terms of gender fluidity and race,” Gupta says. The younger generation’s insistence on an inclusive politics of community, the coexistence of differing subjectivities that exist outside of conventional heteronormative narratives, follows the legacy of Gupta’s work and activism. In the series Friends and Their Friends (2010–15), Anoop Ray sensitively records the simple and immediate joy of unexpectedly falling into a community that nourishes and sustains. Ray had just moved from a small town to Delhi when he started to take these pictures. “In the metropolitan city,” Ray says, “I saw new relationships and the myriad of expression they held.”

With passion and resolve, these photographers depict their own experiences of community. They are fragile and vulnerable formations, networks of kinships and shared solidarities transgressing generations and borders. For Gupta, the momentum is belated but timely. “Whereas it has taken years for museums to notice work by me and my LGBT contemporaries, our queer graduates are appearing in major museum exhibitions,” Gupta says. “In the 1990s, I thought identity politics had had its day, culturally speaking, but clearly, it’s having a revival. Better late than never.”

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

Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel

“A novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants—to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics,” Arundhati Roy recently wrote. Having risen to international fame with her Booker Prize–winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), Roy is a singular voice in contemporary literature, producing riveting works of fiction, along with a prodigious output of essays that address class, gender, and politics with a moral clarity and urgency that reflect her role as a committed activist.

Born in a small town in Northeastern India, Roy moved to Delhi to study architecture, a background that would shape her work as a writer. Here, the filmmaker and essayist Shohini Ghosh speaks with Roy about the links between the space of a novel and the built environs of the city as well as the political crises and large-scale farmers’ protests that have shaken Delhi and reverberated around the world. Their conversation is illustrated with images by Mayank Austen Soofi, known for his popular Instagram account called “The Delhi Walla,” and a photographer whom Roy considers to be one of the city’s finest, most tender chroniclers. (This conversation took place before the second COVID-19 wave hit India. Read more from Roy on the impact of the health crisis.)

Roy’s copy of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and a manuscript for a speech about “fighting for love,” New Delhi, February 2021

Roy’s bookshelf, New Delhi, February 2021
Photographs by Ashish Shah for Aperture

Shohini Ghosh: How did you end up coming to Delhi?

Arundhati Roy: It was a well-plotted escape from the village and the small town nearby where I grew up in Kerala. As a child, I was surrounded by concentric layers of fear and dread that came from within my home and family as well as from the community. My mother had married “outside” her community—the very closed, casteist, moribund, and elite Syrian Christian community of Kerala—and then she had committed the double crime of getting divorced. So my brother and I, while we did not belong to any socially oppressed caste or community, were made to understand, in a million different ways both subtle and crude, that we did not belong in the home we lived in or the society to which my mother’s family belonged. To me, the message was clear: “Nobody will marry you.” It made me feel, from a very young age, Why the heck would I want to belong? Why would I want to marry any of you? I yearned to escape.

Ghosh: How old were you?

Roy: I fled in 1976, when I was sixteen. I knew I needed to get an education that would make me financially independent. I chose to study architecture. I had been deeply impacted by the ideas of the architect Laurie Baker, who built the school my mother founded and continues to run. I studied there for many years. “No-cost architecture” is how Baker described his work—the most beautiful buildings that were built so cheaply that they threatened the building industry. So at sixteen, as soon as I finished high school, I was on a train to Delhi to sit for the entrance exam to SPA, the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture. The journey was three days and two nights long . . . and I arrived in a different world. When I turned seventeen and was in my second year, I stopped going home. I never went for years. I worked my way through college—of course, I could do that then. Now, things have changed. Now, higher education is closing its doors to those who have no money. Every day, I feel gratitude to this city that liberated me. Now, I do go back home to Kerala. Those old wounds have healed, but they still lurk close to the surface of my skin.

Mayank Austen Soofi, The litter left behind by picnickers around a security guard’s chair outside a public garden, August 2019

Ghosh: What images of the city do you most remember from that time?

Roy: I remember the excitement of pulling into the railway station. The smell of freedom and the excitement of anonymity. Anonymity is impossible in villages and small towns in India. For me, that was the greatest gift anybody could give me. The infinite possibilities of naughtiness. I was so ridiculous though. When I first arrived, I had no sense whatsoever of the scale and size of a big city. So I went to the auto- rickshaw rank at the railway station and asked a driver if he could take me to Mrs. Joseph’s house. I still laugh out loud when I think about it. Mrs. Joseph was my mother’s sister—a good and decent Christian—who lived in Delhi then. I was to stay with her. She wasn’t thrilled about her nonpedigreed niece’s arrival and made that very clear. So I made it a point to inflict myself and my indecency on her as often as I could.

I was also very frightened of the city. This is because of the films I saw growing up. At the time, in virtually every Malayalam film, the heroine got raped. The rape was always lovingly choreographed, in elliptical ways . . . reflections in the ceiling fan, flowers dropping off their stalks, or whatever. Utterly destroyed women. As a result of this, I grew up believing that every woman gets raped. It was just a question of where and when. So in that auto rickshaw, on my way to Mrs. Joseph’s house in Delhi, I clutched a knife hidden in my bag. I was fully prepared to meet my womanly future. The first few days in the city were intimidating . . . but then . . . the school of architecture. Anarchist heaven. I knew I had escaped forever. I would be safe in a dangerous sort of way.

Mayank Austen Soofi, A homeless dog always seen sitting on a centuries-old stone bridge that runs over an artificial lake, February 2021

Ghosh: Before you wrote The God of Small Things, you wrote two screenplays: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones (1988) and Electric Moon (1992). Did the city play a role in shaping you as a writer?

Roy: In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones is about students in architecture school—stoned, bell-bottom-wearing hippie kids in the 1970s. Annie is actually a man, Anand Grover, who is repeating his final year for the fourth time, the victim of one professor’s vendetta. Annie’s a little eccentric, a little defeated. He rears chickens and rabbits in his hostel room and is obsessed with how to handle what he calls “rural–urban migration.” Although I opted for architecture because of a kind of desperation to begin to earn a living, the five years I spent there have laid the foundation for the ways in which I see and think.

By the time I was in my final year, I was almost as interested in urban studies as I was in architecture. My thesis was not a design thesis. It was about the city, postcolonial Delhi, how it came to be what it is, what it does to the people who live in it. The city and the noncity. The citizen who is welcome and for whom the city and its laws are made.

The noncitizen who is unwelcome and lives in the cracks between institutions, who subverts laws as well as the imagination of the urban designer. Who shits on top of the sewage system. That lens, that way of looking at our cities, has remained with me through my screenplays and my novels. To me, the city was and is a fascinating, never-ending story. It’s a novel with characters who appear and disappear, shaping the physical space around them.

Mayank Austen Soofi, Protesters in an area reserved for women during a late night candle- light vigil against the Citizenship Amendment Act, February 2020

Ghosh: When you wrote The God of Small Things, you were living in Delhi and writing about a place that was far away in space and time. How did that work out?

Roy: It didn’t seem to matter one bit. The village I grew up in, the pickle factory, the landscape, the people, the green river, the coconut trees that bent into it, the broken yellow moon reflected in it, the flash of fish—I am made up of all that. I am that. No matter where I go. I knew every plant and worm and fish and insect; they were characters in my life. As oppressive as the humans around me were when I was growing up, the river and the insects, the rain and mud were my pals. But perhaps the physical landscape of Kerala was conjured up more vividly in The God of Small Things because it was so different from the place that I was living and writing in.

Ghosh: For me, the experience of reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was like learning to navigate a copious landscape. In one of the chapters in the book, a character called Khadija takes one of the protagonists, S. Tilottama (or Tilo), on a journey across a city in Kashmir. They travel, and I quote, “through a maze of narrow, winding streets in a part of a town that seemed to be interconnected in several ways—underground and overground, vertically and diagonally via streets and rooftops and secret passages—like a single organism. A giant coral or an anthill.” This could well be a description of the teeming metropolis that is Utmost Happiness, in the alleyways of which the many interconnected narratives of the novel unfold. Did your training as an architect and urban planner have an impact on structuring the novel?

Roy: Yes. The city as a novel—the novel as a city. Truly, I think like that. And I don’t just mean the physical landscape of both cities and novels. I mean it more in the manner of how something is designed, and then that design is subverted, ambushed, enveloped, and turned into something else, and then all of that becomes a part of another design, and on it goes. Something like the way the shapes of cities inscribe themselves spatially on the surface of the earth as distinct from the amorphous countryside that surrounds them. They have a form, a logic that is not immediately obvious, except, of course, imperial cities that were created by fiat and decree. But those, too, are subverted. In the novel, too, this happens often to the narrative. And yet, it’s only once you begin to live in the novel-city of Utmost Happiness that you understand that the apparent chaos is designed. It, too, has its underground, overground, and diagonal pathways that interconnect. It has its own complicated logic.

If you remember, there is a passage in which Tilo thinks about the city . . . It’s a sort of wakeful reverie. She thinks of cities like starlight traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves have died— “fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.” So there’s that awareness not just of the city, but of the meaning of the city. Right now in Delhi, the confrontation between the city—the seat of political and economic power—and the countryside, and the plundered planet is playing out in a literal way. As we speak, millions of farmers have risen in protest against three new farm laws that will put the levers of control of Indian agriculture in the hands of major corporations. Over the last twenty years, hundreds of thousands of farmers caught in a debt trap have committed suicide, many by drinking the pesticide they are being forced to use to grow crops that the market wants but their land does not support. And now, with these new laws, they are facing an existential crisis. Hundreds of thousands of farmers have arrived on the outskirts of Delhi. It’s being called the biggest protest in human history. The government has barricaded the city with concrete barriers, concertina wire, and iron spikes, and the area is being patrolled by thousands of police and paramilitary. The borders are no longer just national borders. New battles are unfolding. In Utmost Happiness, those conflicts are folded into one another—the freedom struggle in Kashmir, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, and the many conflicts, environmental and political, that are displacing and devastating people in myriad ways. All these are connected to one another like a maze of city streets.

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Ghosh: In its magnificent embrace of people (living and dead), creatures (birds, mammals, bugs), and places (from the dystopian to the paradisal), Utmost Happiness imagines a world where the nonhuman is integral. Even in The God of Small Things, the world in which the narrative unfolds is as important as the protagonists themselves. In your universe, it seems to me, the human predicament is inextricably linked to the nonhuman.

Roy: Not everybody notices that, actually. I remember somebody telling me that she thought the hum and scurry of insects and other creatures in The God of Small Things were like a background music score. She could hear them. I am incapable of looking at the world, or even thinking about it, with only humans at its center. How can we take anything—any discourse, any ideology, any religion even—that is exclusively about human beings seriously? It’s a sort of violence. A futile, blinkered, foolish violence.

Of course, in The God of Small Things, the landscape and its nonhuman populations wrap themselves around the human protagonists. But even in Utmost Happiness, the nonhumans are an integral part of life. There is so much nonhuman activity even in our most densely populated metropolitan cities, and it’s not just pets on leashes. There are crow conferences, street-dog conclaves, horse confabulations, monkey madness. All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open—and yes, your heart too—and whole other cities and city-stories will make themselves known.

Mayank Austen Soofi, A grocer enjoying her siesta, May 2018

Ghosh: The COVID-19 pandemic and the complete lockdown in March 2020 transformed the images and imagination of the city. As a majority of the inhabitants locked themselves in, you ventured out into the streets. What did you see?

Roy: I saw what the rest of the world saw, except not just on my cellphone screen. When Modi announced the world’s strictest, cruelest lockdown, giving 1.3 billion of us just four hours’ notice, it became obvious that he had absolutely no idea about the country he is the prime minister of. He was just copying what was being done in the United States and Europe but in a more authoritarian, autocratic way. The previous week, he had asked people to come out on their balconies and bang their pots and pans and ring bells! Like people had in Europe. How many people have balconies in India? It was ridiculous. Lockdowns in affluent Western countries were to enforce physical distancing. But here in India, in the densely populated slums and shantytowns, it enforced the opposite—physical compression. The day after the lockdown was announced, India spilled its terrible secrets for the world to see. Millions of working-class people hidden away in the crevices of big cities—the noncitizens of my architecture thesis—working for a pittance in informal, unregulated jobs, found themselves out of work, unable to pay rent for the cramped tenements they lived in. A mass migration began—biblical in its scale. Millions of workers and their families began walking thousands of miles home to their villages. On the way, they were beaten by the police, hosed down, killed by trains as they walked on railway tracks, held in containment camps. As soon as I saw the streets of our city turn into this river of COVID refugees, I went out. I saw the scenes on the Delhi–Uttar Pradesh border. I walked part of the way with some of the walking people.

Mayank Austen Soofi, Arundhati Roy walking late at night in the historic quarter of Old Delhi, November 2016
All photographs courtesy the artist

Ghosh: Well over a year later, what has been the consequence for the city?

Roy: The result of this lockdown that wasn’t a lockdown is that the virus spread across India. Fortunately, it hasn’t proved as devastating or as fatal as it has been—and continues to be—in more affluent countries. But the lockdown caused an already severely slowing economy to crash. The urban economy collapsed. India’s GDP shows deep negative growth. In all this devastation, even though agriculture is generally in crisis, during the COVID pandemic, farmers continued to work their fields, so we did not have a food-production crisis. But if all this awfulness isn’t enough, now farmers, too, have been dealt a blow from which they may not recover. Unless we all stand with them and force the repeal of these new laws. So here’s the latest chapter in the story-city and the city-story. Last year, millions of workers were forced to leave the city. This year, millions of farmers have arrived at its outskirts. Between these two events lies an epic tale. The story of our times.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 243, “Looking Out/Looking In: Delhi,” under the title “Arundhati Roy: The City as a Novel.”

How Three Photographers Are Working through India’s COVID-19 Crisis

koī haath bhī na milā.egā jo gale miloge tapāk se
ye na.e mizāj kā shahr hai zarā fāsle se milā karo

(You’ll be refused a handshake if you go for an ardent embrace.
This city’s in a fresh temper, keep your distance when meeting.)
—Bashir Badr

It has been a year of looking out windows and doors that frame the world like crude viewfinders, of observing caution and of seeing from afar. For lens-based practitioners, distance, the defining condition of the COVID-19 pandemic, is an aesthetic concern as much as a hygienic one. Photographers interpret and render subjects through intimacy, remoteness, or even just an acknowledgement of the space in between. The camera’s manipulability can extend the human eye and, therefore, presence to cover spans proscribed during a time of contagion or bring its details into focus. As India battles its second wave of the novel coronavirus, photographers are either out on the streets documenting the crisis or confined to their homes, focusing on their loved ones. In my rented apartment in the hard-hit Indian capital of Delhi, I’m on the phone with photographers who’ve retreated to their hometowns, and they tell me that the temporal distance between when their work was originally shot and the present appears disorienting. Will the city they photographed exist on the other side of the pandemic?

Prarthna Singh, Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance, New Delhi, 2020
Courtesy the artist

Prarthna Singh has held onto the moment of the protests against India’s amended citizenship law through the bonds she forged there a year and a half ago while making Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh: One Hundred Days of Resistance (2020). She exchanges voice notes with a young woman she befriended there who lost her mother to the virus. “Perhaps without this collective grief, I wouldn’t have noticed this tender aspect of the work I do,” Singh says. Though she has been on assignment in between the Indian government’s strictly enforced national lockdowns, 2020 allowed her to step back and reflect. Ironically, it has brought her closer to her subjects, many of whom exist at the edge of visibility: “Photography is a starting point, the camera just an opener. My practice doesn’t stand in isolation,” she says. “It’s the relationships formed because of it that make me believe in its worth.”

Singh is based in Mumbai, although she spent two months of India’s second wave with her parents in Jaipur. Two of her current projects include a series on people held as illegal immigrants in Assam’s detention camps, and a collaboration with journalist Snigdha Poonam comprising images of young voters in the run-up to India’s 2024 general election. She hasn’t changed her approach in the wake of the pandemic, continuing to have involved conversations with those she photographs, mask and all. At home in Jaipur with her parents, she turned down commissions requiring her to be outdoors for the sake of their health. But there are other consolations. “I’ve been photographing my mother a lot, which I’d never done,” Singh says. “Now I have this fear of losing my parents.”

Aditi Jain, Maze of Binaries, New Delhi, 2019
Courtesy the artist

Family members are a natural subject during this housebound period. In her hometown of Bhopal, Aditi Jain has also been photographing her mother, as well as the latter’s paintings and craftwork, as a way to retain the creative momentum she worries has been adversely affected by the pandemic. “I’ll shoot in my garden, even birds on the terrace. I’m someone who needs to be photographing all the time,” she tells me. In the course of developing her series Maze of Binaries (2019), on Delhi’s transgender community, Jain became deeply attached to her subjects. Given the current context, when those already marginalized by the state face further financial precarity and emotional turmoil, maintaining these long-distance friendships has become even more important. As we discuss COVID-19 and how she sees an artist’s role in times of distress, Jain brings up the work of her idol, pioneering photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith, whose photographs, she says, “communicate that pain does not belong to an individual person but is felt by society.”

It’s a sentiment shared by Uzma Mohsin when she asserts that “the role of art is to address crises.” Sensitivity to sociopolitical upheavals permeates Mohsin’s transparent photomontages that combine citizens’ applications to organize protests in Delhi with portraits from Jantar Mantar, the city’s iconic protest site. No dissenting crowds can congregate there now. Mohsin herself is away from the capital, in her native Aligarh, making visual journals and photograms in the absence of a darkroom. (During the Citizenship Amendment Act protests in December 2019, Aligarh Muslim University made headlines when its students stood up to the regime and faced its wrath.) Staying home is working out for Mohsin. “I received a grant to do a photographic study of Aligarh and its significance as a locus of liberal Muslim life,” she says. “Right now, since I can’t meet people, especially older folk I’d need to speak to for this project, I am reading a lot of history.” 

Uzma Mohsin, Songkeepers, New Delhi, 2018
© the artist

Made toward the end of the first term of the Hindu fundamentalist Narendra Modi­–led government, Mohsin’s series Songkeepers (2018) appears prescient and impossible to replicate now. I wonder aloud whether the Delhi we emerge to will be the same one we sheltered from. “A lot has changed since I accessed those Right to Information applications in Delhi’s police headquarters,” Mohsin says. “Now the city’s government buildings are inaccessible. As the virus keeps us apart, there’s a sense of being kept at a distance by the state too.”

Mohsin is referring to the Central Vista Redevelopment Project that anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has characterized as “the mausoleum of the spirit of Shaheen Bagh.” Ostensibly a renovation of the central administrative complex designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker in the early decades of the twentieth century, the project is, in fact, an ominous signal. The Central Vista has served as the chief node of the postindependence capital of New Delhi for more than seventy years. Its reconstruction is widely understood as the architectural erasure of a secular, democratic republic and its replacement by the ninth city of Delhi—the heart of a Hindu nation. 

The adjustment of focal length integral to photographic practice has, over the past two years, become a mode of ordinary living for humans worldwide, as proximities are modulated at various scales—literal and symbolic. The angles and distances at which Singh, Jain, and Mohsin capture Delhi’s oft-ignored citizens enhance the city’s peripheral vision. I ask the three photographers if the pandemic made certain compositional choices challenging—if, for example, the close-up might go out of style for a bit. Jain and Mohsin agree. Singh shrugs; the close-up was never her favored shot anyway. “I maintain space between myself and my subjects,” she says. “I prefer giving them room to breathe.”

Read more about Aditi Jain, Uzma Mohsin, and Prarthna Singh’s photography in Aperture, issue 243, “Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In” (Summer 2021).