People in the picture

The stress on social documentary was evident the moment one stepped into the IGNCA, the venue for the third Delhi Photo Festival 2015 (October 30 to November 8). ‘Naturally so’, one would say, as the photograph is about capturing — whether aesthetically or abstractly — a slice of human life.

It is about telling an untold story or exposing the ‘truth’, even though contemporary photography has long questioned the photograph as ‘a document of truth’. In her renowned treatise, On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced.” Hence they are subject to all the limitations that most artworks operate within, even while attempting to be a part of the larger ‘truth.’

Nevertheless, photography, unlike painting or writing, still operates in the realm of the real — in that it works with what is physically present, rather than some imagined vision. Photography is ultimately about people, places and the objects touched by their lives. Whether posed or candid, sensational or subtle, the images are crafted out of the stuff of everyday life.

The festival’s curator, Prashant Panjiar, said in an almost playful tone, “Every year the Delhi Photo Festival gets a lot of ‘conflicting’ comments. The photojournalists feel that we have made our selection too artsy and abstract while the artist and fashion-photographers feel that we have focused more on documentary photography. This makes me feel that our standard is quality of work and not genre.”

His team for the festival included the likes of Sohrab Hura, a talented young photographer from Delhi. “The intention this year is to showcase a selection of contemporary photography from around the world,” Panjiar said.

This year there certainly was an emphasis on humanity. Whether it was Australian Ian Flander’s shadowy black-and-whites that capture the bleak lives of a group of enslaved sex-workers in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, or the exuberantly colourful frames belonging to Bangladeshi Debashish Chakrabarty, who captures the virtual and surreal lives of ‘gamers’ in China, the focus was quite clearly on the human condition.

Flander spent three years in Phnom Penh, building bridges with the sex workers, who were trapped in a web of trafficking, drugs and dependency. His gaze is one of deep empathy, and he was moved to go beyond the act of just making photographs.

“On November 12, 2014, the information I supplied the NGO resulted in the rescue of eight women and three children from the brothel, along with the arrest and prosecution of the traffickers,” said Flander.

Contrasting these social documentary works were some delightful and rather nostalgic images from one of the pioneers of Indian photojournalism, Raghu Rai. We see a dapper Rai looking into the mirror, flanked by his two children and with his ‘third child’ — his camera — in his lap.

This early ‘selfie’ is touched with tenderness and speaks volumes about the act of seeing and being seen. It also takes us into not just Rai’s world as a photojournalist on a quest, but also his personal space, revealing small vulnerabilities and moments of gentleness. “You never stop being a photographer,” says the icon, who shared many of his pearls of wisdom with younger photographers in the talks and seminars section.

No photo-exhibition is ever complete without tipping its hat to some of the historically important photographers. In this instance it was Kishor Parekh’s seminal work on the Bangladesh War of 1971. Parekh was a lone voice at the time, self-funded and self-assigned, covering the atrocities committed in East Pakistan. His early photo-book was, and still is a very important part of history.

Moving away from the documentation of mankind to the objects created by them, Danila Tkachenko’s images explore desolate, abandoned landscapes in Russia. The bleached, snow-covered expanses make the objects — an abandoned submarine or amphibian plane, or a former mining town that has been turned into a testing field for bombs — appear even more dramatic.

“Humans are always trying to own ever more than they have,” says Tkachenko on his website, “this is the source of technical progress. The by-products of this progress are various commodities as well as the tools of violence in order to hold power over others.”

Equally noteworthy was the one-of-a-kind photo-book exhibition curated by Austrian gallerist and photographer Regina Anzenberger, as also a unique exploration of the medium by French photographer Olivier Culmann, and Dutch photographer Rob Hornstra’s compelling documentation of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

Given the span and the variety of the imagery, one came away with a rather overwhelming yet fulfilling sensation, almost as if all of humanity were squeezed within the confines of IGNCA to discuss and interface. Of course, no exhibition can ever be exhaustive enough, and hopefully next year, there will be newer visions on display, even as we hark back to history.

“I think that it’s impossible to point out what direction photography is going to take in the future. I am a rather old-fashioned photojournalist who cannot even shoot with a ‘smartphone’. There are even speculations that images in the future will be made by an algorithm and not even by cameras and people… but then, I am a bit old-fashioned,” said Panjiar, a former photo-editor of India Today .

Georgina Maddox is a Delhi-based art writer

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