This world is what I have called the “City of Photos”, a subterranean world that underlies our own. In this city we can travel freely through time, space and different realities, as photographs themselves do exactly that when they take us back in time or serve to express our fantasies. I draw upon this inherent quality to make inferences, and to speculate about what lies beneath and beyond the visible frame and, eventually, within ourselves.
My photo journey begins in Calcutta. Photos keep drawing us into the city, and the city, full of memories and nostalgia, nudges us back into the world of photos. Many old-fashioned studios still survive in Kolkata, their props unchanged since the black-and-white days, poses harking back to the 1970s and shabby backdrops catering to an increasingly impoverished clientele. But none of this can be made sense of without looking at the city itself, and understanding its particular spirit. As we move between present-day studios and the city, we discover a place full of shifting time zones, where the past is inextricably intertwined with the present and where, in the midst of extreme decay, the most contemporary strivings may be sensed.
When we enter Hyder Ali's studio we take a step back into the seventies. Even the street outside doesn't betray signs of the twenty first century--it's still the rickety old trams, the hand pulled rickshaws and the black and yellow ambassodor cabs. Browsing through the B&W photos displayed in glass showcases full of dust and cobwebs our eyes fall on the colored photos of people posing against a skyscaper on fire. We don't believe our eyes at first, the background in the picture, except for the fire and the planes (which have been thrown in for a good measure), would have passed off as a modern cityscape. Even the poses are no different from customer's poses elsewhere and the people posing in the pictures are from all walks of life-- college youth, newly married couples, mothers with kids.
EditRegion6
The shop owner allures to Calcutta being the dumpyard of the world when asked why he used this background. Is it only in a third world junkyard that nothing is wasted, everything finds a use? It needs mulling over, this unexpected notion of the disaster backdrop as recycled image, squeezed of its last drops of meaning by the world media and thrown out at last, only to be resurrected in a walk-in photo studio in a poor locality of a dilapidated, faraway metropolis.
What meanings do we find in this image? Does it mean that certain people in Calcutta rejoiced the 9/11 disaster? Are they anti-American? Are they Muslims? Are they perverse, unsympathetic, crude people? As you begin to talk to the owner, photographer and customers you realize that none of this is true and that we are not going to find easy answers to why this tragic image was used as a background.
To me his act is more than just shocking or amusing—it is subversive. In one single artistic stroke he manages to comment on the hawkish role of media in today's world. As he explains how it was difficult to get away from the image of planes smashing into the WTC for weeks after the 9/11 disaster, it is clear that the image, telecast endlessly in the garb of news, was sensationalism masquerading as concern. This disaster (like most others) was reduced to a spectacle, the envy of Hollywood. So, when in the backwaters of Calcutta, Hyder Ali uses the WTC background to attract customers, it lands up representing the journey of a disaster from human tragedy to spectacle to disaster tourism. Similarly, in other sequences, when people stand against railway accidents or cyclone backdrops, I do not find it simply shocking or morbid but a compelling commentary on media, disasters and TRP ratings.
In the city of Ahmedabad, a different spirit prevails. We share in the everyday happenings at a photo studio that lies, geographically and emotionally, at the heart of the Muslim community in an economically backward area of the city. It is, paradoxically, the theme of absence that unites the wide variety of photographic expressions in the film. Everywhere, absences feed the fantasy machine—the absence of the beloved, the absence of eyes on a dead man, the absence of resources that could allow us to travel to far off places or live in beautiful homes, the absence of greenery in the urban landscape, and even—from the beginnings of photography to the present—the absence of choice in facing the lens. It is in these implicit areas of longing and freedom that the political impinges on the personal.
City of Photos moves through the dualities characteristic of photography: Are they real, or illusory? Do they immortalize, or—capturing, as they do, fleeting moments of life—are they grim reminders of mortality?
I as the filmmaker take on many roles--from an old woman remembering her visits to a photo studio as a child, to an old man talking about his response to matrimonial picture of his wife when he was nineteen. The narration idiomatically shifts between the “you” and the “I” collapsing the distance between self and other, enabling individual photographic experiences to enter the space of collective memory and desire.
EditRegion8
All these readings into the material led me to look for a different ending—more disturbing, maybe, but making more of a comment on the dialectics of photographic practice, with the struggle between its fascistic and democratic tendencies. From the outside at least, the space of the posed photo seems like a democratic one, there seems to be a semblance of choice. But is this for real? And this is the question that I end the film with. The studio photograph of the famine victims allowed me to explore several notions: the powerful, in this case the colonial photographer, making the powerless pose; the subversion of a whole photographic genre at the heart of this photo, in which famine victims are posed like a happy family—an irony that makes the photographer's attitude much more complex; the paradox of dying people being made immortal, and what this tells us about photo reality. Finally, I take the discourse a step further by unfolding a fantasy backdrop behind the famine victims—bringing the film back to the basic theme of absence and fantasy. I hope that somewhere in the viewer's mind, this ending links up with earlier images—of the two little girls with injured eyes in front of the Taj, of the thin boy who wants to pose like Hrithik Roshan. There's no doubt that there has been increasing democratisation in the use and making of photos over the last hundred years, with the poorest of people now having the means to fantasy. But in a scenario where photo studio fantasies continue to be a documentation of absences in the lives of the poor, marginalised and dispossessed, the question remains: are these fantasies truly exercises in self-expression, or harmless games that mitigate against real change?
Nishtha Jain