The first definition promised a democratic, a more scientific and objective, mirror-like reflection of the world and its people. The second delivered a dangerous documentation and power preservation mode in a space that was a window through which the powerful West viewed, mapped and created the lesser Rest. A window that we, the 21st century, supposedly post-colonial, Rest, continue to peer through as we look at ourselves as reflections mirrored in the world’s museums and in photography’s own ‘Museum without Walls.’[break]
Among Shrestha’s favourite subjects were villagers in traditional ethnic attire. This photo is from the Gurung village of Ghandruk. “Those are authentic clothes and ornaments,” Shrestha explains, “a lot of gold, handloom dresses, and velvet blouses.” Shrestha speculates that the visible wealth of the women in the photograph was probably due to the fact that they had male relatives serving in the British Army.
1968/120mm negative
We see and hardly question the reflections that certain outdated uses of photography created. We do this despite an increasing understanding that museums are a system of control. They are spaces that are used to perpetuate elite power by institutionalizing a rather one sided Representation that has justifiably come under serious questioning in our post-modern and post-colonial worlds. The questioning, though, sadly remains cloistered in academic circles. It has yet to filter down to the button-pressing users of the most powerful representational language the world has ever known: Photography!
Photography in its different, increasingly more widespread and powerful multi headed and multi armed avatars. As film, television and the web, these photography avatars weave a worldview that works, primarily for the world’s elite.
Photography’s avatars create countless images. Images produced by the black barrels of lenses. Barrels that may not be made of gun metal but have a far greater, quieter and subtler power. A power that guns, actually, never had. It is images, after all, that drive the world’s consumption-driven economies even as they construct our societies and our identities as consumers.
Both, the photographic mirror and the photographic window, were (and still are) framed within the politics of 19th century colonialism. A colonialism that never really ended and, in fact, continues to exist as, a far more dangerous, neocolonialism. A neocolonialism that doesn’t occupy lands but seeks to occupy and control minds.
Photography and colonialism were, we have to remember, inseparable partners in the colonial project. And, today, photography continues to play its part in the creation of what is called ‘soft power hegemonies.’
Photographs construct a worldview that suits a society’s ruling elite. They work by naturalizing Perceptions as Reality. They work by memorializing what is in them and by monumentalizing it in our minds as “our Heritage.”Heritage that is then deemed worthy of Conservation and Preservation for the future. The un-photographed becomes the unseen. Something that is then easier to ignore, to forget and even to destroy.
“From the earliest days of the calotype, the curious tripod, with its mysterious chamber and mouth of brass taught the natives of this country that their conquerors were inventors of other instruments besides the formidable guns of their artillery, which, though, as suspicious perhaps in appearance, attained their object with less noise and smoke,” said Samuel Bourne
Bourne was a 19th century British photographer who worked in India and set up the famous Bourne and Sheppard studio in Calcutta. It was a studio that more than just photographed the Royalty from all over British India - Nepal included. It created a very Orientalist image bank of the exotic other – one that echoed and was found in the countless ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’ that were regular drawing room furniture in 19th-century Western homes. These Cabinets served as photographically illustrated encyclopedias of colonized worlds and Peoples. Those wooden cabinets, filled with anthropologically ordered photographs, popularized and reinforced ideas of poor and rich savages out there that needed to be civilized and looked after.
Two women transporting firewood in a small wooden boat over the calm waters of Phewa Lake. “There were no fancy boats at that time,” Shrestha says, speaking of the days before the tourist boom.
1968/120mm negative.
Rudyard Kipling’s writings alone would not have been able to sell the idea of “the White Man’s Burden.” Without the photographic, supposedly objective, proof, all the scientific studies by all those 19th century anthropologists and ethnographers could not have sold the social Darwinism that drove the colonial game of civilizing and controlling the Rest of the world.
Axel Plathe, the UNESCO Representative to Nepal and the chief guest at the opening of the exhibition, talked about “Mukunda Bahadur Shrestha’s photographs bringing knowledge about Nepal and the living culture of its people to audiences across linguistic, geographical and cultural boundaries of reality and beyond personal storytelling.” They were, he said, “now part of Nepal’s audiovisual legacy. And as such,” he continued, “they form part of the universal documentary heritage, of the Memory of the World.”
“The universal documentary heritage” that creates “the Memory of the World” is highly suspect these days. Documentary photography has a long history of being a partner in the creation of a ‘soft’ hegemonic power over the poor and, somehow lesser, beings of the world. The idea of a singular Memory of the World created by a singular documentary heritage is not just suspect, it is a downright dangerous idea whose time has long gone. (Though, surprisingly enough, documentary photography courses and workshops continue to be taught to young photographers - and that too by western white documentary photographers who are still “Othering” and Orientalizing the rest of us. But then, that language of ‘documenting’ others is one that the West still uses when it talks of a singular History of the world. A history that is linear and can come to an end once capitalism succeeds in becoming the only economic model of the world - a la Francis Fukuyama. What is promoted by that sense of History is an economic model that the ‘advanced, first world, west’ refuses to let go of, one that it is fighting wars to enforce- at missile point. One in which photography is still a major player.
The West’s power to control representation has to be challenged and reclaimed. Reclaimed and remade - as many Memories. As Histories and as Herstories. Hundreds, thousands and millions, or even billions, of them. Stories and memories not written in a linear flow that is about progress from Primitive to progressive Modern. Stories not told within set power structures and set storytelling systems. We can do that easily now. Today’s technologies and increasingly cheaper democratic digital distribution networks are making the once impossible to think of very possible. The Local can now go Global. The localization of the Global is now not the only way ‘forward.’ Globalization can be a double edged sword - in our hands for a change and in the hands of the children of lesser gods in the hinterlands of Nations.
“Personal storytelling” that one is supposed to move beyond is actually the future of reclaimed History. As Histories. The ease of telling and broadcasting stories across the increasingly connected digital duniya can create real democracies. But only if one is aware of the political necessity to do so. To paraphrase Trinh Minh-Ha, we need to tell our stories in our ways before they are told by someone else, for us, in their ways. And that is a right that one has to extend to all sections of society by enabling multiple voices. Giving them an equal space in the creation of more than just “National” Identities.
Axel Plathe talked about how “preserving and making this photographic heritage accessible will help understand Nepal’s people, their history and culture. Its preservation is important to Nepal, where cultural diversity and shared heritage are so vital for nurturing the sense of one nation.”
The one nation, with one people speaking one single language that Prithvi Narayan Shah’s raised finger signifies was a top-down, pre-democracy model. One that, eventually, did not work. It was a model that is being challenged at this very moment as a Naya Nepal seeks to create a fairer Federal state. A state where all peoples have a right to self-representation. Not just on the political stage, either. Shared cultures and cultures that respect other cultures are what bring people together and keep them together. Singular ideas of nationhood will not work for too much longer as peoples’ wars extend beyond the political space to the cultural arena.
During his visit to the Gurung village of Ghandruk, Shrestha stayed with the head of the village assembly, the pradhan pancha. In this photograph the pancha is seen wearing a traditional woollen shawl, and he is accompanied by two Tibetan Mastiffs, with the Annapurna South and Himchuli in the background. 1968/120mm negative
And this brings me to a question that I just have to ask, even at the risk of being called an ‘interfering Indian.’
Why, one wonders, was Nepal Picture Library’s first exhibition in an Art Gallery curated by a Western anthropologist?
The partnership of Anthropology and Photography, after all, has a very troubling history. A colonial history where Photography was used by anthropologists to study and help subordinate societies all around the world. And although their part in the creation of Western power has been critically examined and condemned by even their own colleagues, Anthropologists and Ethnographers are again a part of Western armies. They serve western occupying powers - in uniform - as “Human Terrain Teams.” The human sciences are being weaponized through these Human Terrain Teams that are helping to advance neo-colonial agendas. All over again. I am troubled by the continued anthropological ‘research; into Other cultures and by the way it promotes neo-colonialism.
There is one last point I will make - again at the risk of potentially rubbing furs the wrong way.
Should photography be reduced to an Art if it is shown publicly? And why should it be considered a more serious art form only when, and if, photographers print on archival paper with archival inks, etc. These are factors that may work to increase Photography’s commercial value as a collectible art form. Make photographers into Artists. But they do little to add value to Photography itself. Photography is, as Man Ray, (the famous American photographer and artist) said, “more than Art” It is more than just an art, I would add. And reducing it to that is probably the most dangerous thing that could happen to Photography. The white gallery walls would sanitize it beyond recognition. Photography would become a very unhappy and sorry practice.
“Society is concerned to tame the photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. To do this it possesses two means. The first consists of making Photography into an Art, for no art is mad.”
The other means of taming the Photograph is to generalize, to gregarize, banalize it until it is no longer confronted by any image in relation to which it can mark itself, assert its special character, its scandal, its madness ,” said Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida.
The camera that enlightens. That is photography for me. Not camera obscura - photography that obscures reality. Photography’s purpose, I believe, is to shine a light into the dark corners of the world. Empower them. For that, it sometimes needs the support of critical texts. This is one of them.
The writer is an eminent independent photographer, writer on photography and an occasional curator.
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