Colin Pantall's blog: dayanita singh

Mother and Elsa: from Life is Elsewhere by Sohrab Hura

I've always wondered about what new photography is happening in India but never really knew quite how dynamic Indian photography is until I asked Sohrab Hura (Magnum member and author of the truly fantastic Life is Elsewhere) about it. Sohrab is helping to run the Delhi Photo-Festival - which takes place at the beginning of November and doubles up with Photo Kathmandu if you're thinking of an India/Nepal Photo-Festival double-header.

I asked Sohrab a few questions about the festivals and Indian photography and this is what he said. It's long but it's worth it - especially for the links and the searches that take you into new and undiscovered places (by me at least).

How did the festival start?

The Delhi Photo Festival was started in 2011 by two photographers, Prashant Panjiar and Dinesh Khanna at a time when nothing of that sort existed in India. At the time it was started, there were only a handful of galleries showing photography. Most photographers would go across either to Chobimela in Bangladesh or to Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia.

I think there was a sense of longing for a community amongst photographers here which was till then nourished by these two festivals. That was one of the main reasons Prashant and Dinesh started the festival and for that they started the non profit Nazar Foundation.

from When Abba was Ill by Adil Hassan

The festival is run primarily by photographers who come together to put in time and work voluntarily and hopefully the roster of people working for the festival will change each year so that as many people can be a part of it as possible. The idea is to make bridges in the region so it's great that we get to have photographers and students not just from all over India but also from some of the neighbouring countries.

from Life is e Elsewhere by Sohrab Hura

Immediately after the first week of the festival people will go to Nepal to support the new festival in Kathmandu which is being started by Photocircle who've been doing some really great work there. This sort of a flow has been quite fantastic for me personally because I've ended up finding some of my closest friends in the photo world in countries like Bangladesh and Nepal and even in Indian cities other than Delhi and perhaps if those opportunities to meet them hadn't existed then life would not have been as rich for me as it is thanks to them.

Now I see more and more dialogues forming across the border/s amongst the new generation of photographers and it's beautiful. It is sometimes not as easy for us to negotiate geographical, political and socio economic boundaries as it may be for example, for people within Europe or at least within a certain part of Europe and such little events just make it just a little easier for us experience something more human that goes beyond photography. For me, this is the most take away from all of the festivals in this region.

What are the Main Events this year?

The programming for the talks is looking good. Naoya Hatakeyama, Ram Rahman, Vivan Sundaram, Olivia Arthur, Philipp Ebeling, Rob Hornstra, Altaf Qadri, Aradhana Seth, Chien-Chi Chang, Sarker Protick, Olivier Culmann, Anne Golaz, Nandan Ghiya and Roger Ballen are few of the confirmed speakers for now.

Fishbar - Olivia Arthur and Philipp Ebeling - will do a masterclass where besides working with the two of them, the participants will also interact with some of the above mentioned people giving artist talks. Priority will be given to photographers from South Asia though all are invited to apply.

This year the festival has invited David Campany to be the keynote speaker to open the festival.

An idea for the future is to have retrospective exhibitions by Indian photographers of an older generation and this year being the first time it's being done, we're showing both Raghu Rai and Kishor Parekh. There will be unseen work by Raghu Rai, photos he's taken over the years of his friends and family, and for Kishor Parekh, his son Swapan Parekh is helping put together work from his book on the 1971 war. They both were good friends and which is having both their exhibitions together is special for the festival.

Regina Anzenberger will be doing a special book exhibition and in addition there will also be an exhibition by BIND a collective formed by young Indian photographers who already produced a fantastic exhibition on photo books earlier this year at FOCUS, a festival in Mumbai. Goa Photo, a festival in Goa will help bring Angela Ferreira from Encontros De Imagem to do a projection of work by portugese photographers

The festival is also keen on experimenting with the collaboration of photography with live performances and for that Sahil Vasudeva, a young pianist is working with Igor Posner and is composing a piece especially for his photos.

page spread from Ballet by Alexey Brodovitch

In addition he will also play a piece in response to the book on ballet by Alexey Brodovitch. Jeet Thayil, the writer and poet known for his booker prize nominated book Narcopolis is also a musician and he and his band will play a set accompanying projections of works that were chosen along with him keeping the energy of of music and words in mind. There are a few other similar performances lined up for the end of each evening.

And of course there will be lots of exhibitions and projections including many young Indian photographers.

And there are will be partner exhibitions happening all over the city timed with the festival, the first them being Prabuddha Dasgupta's retrospective at the National gallery of Modern Art starting on the 19th of September 2015 where his retrospective book will also be launched. The exhibitions will carry on till after the festival and walks are being arranged as a part of the festival.

What are the main photographic drives in India (South Asia)?

To save time and space maybe I'll have to generalise a bit and that means that I'm just scratching the surface here. For many years there was a big influence of both Raghu Rai and Raghubir Singh, which is not to negate the importance of the works of people before them, but the two of them had a powerful influence on photographers in India in the last many decades.

Dayanita Singh opened a new window for subsequent generations with her dogged support of photobooks at a time when it was being talked about the way it is today. To say that her stand to support photo books all these years has been vindicated is a bit of an understatement.

Umrao Shergill: After a Bath (Self-Portrait) 1904

There are people like Pushpamala N, Tejal Shah, Annu Mathew, Nandini Valli who've looked at self portraiture and performance. While this was not something new in photography here - there was also Umrao Shergill who did it about a 100 years ago - in the last couple of decades or so this approach has gained more importance.

Pablo Bartholomew was known mainly for his photo journalistic work during the years he was active as a reportage photographer, but he actually did very beautiful work autobiographical in nature while he was in his 20's. Also his father Richard Bartholomew who was one of the most known art critics was a very good photographer himself

Today the archive has a big presence in photography in this part of the world. TheAlkazi Foundation is famous for its archive that is supposedly larger than that held by the government of India and i think they are also the current caretakers of Homai Vyarwalla's archive.

Anusha Yadav started the Indian Memory Project some years ago, which was a collaboration with people who sent in old photos and stories from their family albums.

The Nepal Picture Library next door in Kathmandu is also doing something similar and they also preserve digitized records of large bodies of work by individual Nepalese photographers of an older generation.

There is also the very beautiful archive with photos from Kashmir, The Country Without a Post Office, named after the poem by Aga Shahid Ali and not too long ago P. Sainath a journalist with some of the most important writings on rural India started the People's Archive of Rural India. In 1997 Satish Sharma, with the help of Anna Fox and Val Williams, published his collection of studio photography in India and made a book out of it much before looking at archives and collection and studio photography was in vogue. There are also younger photographers like Kapil Das who besides being a good photographer himself with a very unique way of looking at things, also finds and gives shape to really funny and surprising collections of photos.

Documentary and photojournalism have had a strong roots here and since the mid 2000's Bharat Sikka, apart from being a very important figure in the fashion/commercial world has also made some really good work that has pushed the limits of what documentary photography used to be in this region. Besides him there are people like Gauri Gill, Ketaki Sheth, Poulomi Basu, Dileep Prakash, Sumit Dayal, Vidura Jang Bahadur, Ryan Lobo who’ve been around for a bit.

Street Photography is still extremely popular and is perhaps what people take to when they start taking photographs. People like Swapan Parekh and Dhruv Malhotra are two people who've made work that has been quite different from the traditional ways of looking at the street. Two young photographers who have been photographing the street traditionally but very beautifully in my opinion are Saurabh Prasad and Monica Tiwari.

Of late of course the photo book has also gained interest. Raghubir Singh was always known for his books, A Way Into India, being the last one to be published posthumously. Dayanita Singh has been a very strong and vocal of the photo book much before all the hype around this medium came into existence. I had mentioned BIND earlier.

Mahesh Shantaram and his wife Vidya Rao regularly open their collection to the public every month and they're quite active in getting people to look at photobooks, what's nice is that their events proactively also encourage people who are not photographers to come and look at photo books. Besides that a photo book exhibition is now becoming a regular part of many of the festivals in this region.

picture by Mahesh Shantaram

What are the difficulties Indian photography faces?

I think in the last few years the internet has given many of the photographers a certain independence that had not really existed before, But despite the proliferation of this new found freedom, the photo scene in India remains quite scattered unlike say for example in Bangladesh where a lot of the current photography is specific to the students and alumni of two institutions i.e. Pathshala and Counterfoto. Personally speaking, this is not a problem for me but it does make a difference if someone from outside was to look for work in a specific country/region/space.

There is also a certain degree of expectation, from outside, of what Indian Photography should be or should not be and I’m sure the same exists across other mediums and other similar non-occidental regions as well.

As in every field and every place, it is a little more difficult for women here too. There is a huge part of photography that may require one to be out and about quite a lot and given the lack of safety for women it is at times not easy for photographers who happen to be women.

Add to it competing with male egos, trying to do what you want to do while dealing with other social pressures, dealing with unwanted and unsolicited advances by men, sometimes from within photography itself and finally there existing this underlying current that far from acknowledges any of these obstacles. It’s not the easiest world out there and kudos to the photographers who happen to be women and who’ve pulled through.

Is there an Indian photographic voice?

Thankfully no.

Sometimes there may be a particular sensibility that may dominate over others, but there is a coexistence of different voices and opinions in general.

Who are some of the Indian photographers we should look at?

picture by Avani Tanya

I often feel that Swapan Parekh and Ketaki Sheth are very overlooked and underrated. There is also Kushal Ray whose work is very nice.

There are nice young scenes bubbling in Calcutta and Chennai. Karthik Subramanian, Ronny Sen, Arko Datto, Soham Gupta are making great work quite passionately.

In Bangalore there is Avani Tanya who is a very intelligent photographer who started photography with the photo book itself and I’m looking forward to seeing what she does in the future.

Then there are people like Mahesh Shantaram, Asmita Parelkar, Nishant Shukla, Nandita Raman, Monica Tiwari, MansiThapliyal, Adil Hasan, Akshay Mahajan and Tenzing Dakpa who are making good work.

picture by Akshay Mahajan (from New Delhi Modern)

In addition I've had a glimpse of the works being done by Vivek Manek, Akshay Bhoan, Gayatri Ganju, Priyanka Chharia, Soumya Sankar Bose, Krishna Tummalapalli, Senthil Kumaran, Jai Singh Nageswaram, Andrea Fernandes and Sushant Chhabria and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in the coming years.

Many of the photographers in India don't have websites so you'll need to dig a bit to see their works and I’m sure I’ve missed out on quite a few other names as well.