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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
from Where we Live by Avani Tanya
Delhi
Photo Festival - http://www.delhiphotofestival.com/
Chobimela - http://www.chobimela.org/
Angkor photo festival - http://angkor-photo.com/
Nazar Foundation - http://www.nazarfoundation.org/nazarfoundation/nf_home.html
Photocircle - http://www.photocircle.com.np/
Naoya
hatakeyama - http://www.lagalerie.de/hatakeyama1.html
vivan sundaram - http://sepiaeye.com/vivan-sundaram
rob hornstra - http://www.borotov.com/
altaf qadri - http://www.altafqadri.com/#/about/bio