By Smriti Nevatia
(published in ‘FIRST PROOF – The Penguin Book of New Writing From India 2’, 2006)
Such is the painted promise that greets us at the portals of an old photo studio in Udaipur. We are travelling about, as much as a small research grant will allow, looking for people and places that might feature in a documentary film on the friendly neighborhood photo studio. Our questions include basic ones like, “Do such places still exist?”, more inquisitive ones like, “Who goes there and for what kind of pictures?” and slightly elaborate ones like, “What can we infer from a posed photo about the world that has been excluded from its frame?”
Nishtha Jain, director and conceiver of this project, and I, her associate, find innumerable studios still thriving, meet all sorts of people who frequent them, and make inferences—with the nonchalance of non-academics—from every gesture and backdrop and pose, but are unable, while shooting City of Photos, to revisit the Udaipur studio that attempted to sum it all up in such neat, if not quite politically correct, fashion. For by then Kolkata has us in thrall. Appropriately enough, when you consider that this was where it all began…
In the extensive visual archive at the Centre for Studies in Social Science, and in the homes of some private collectors, we discover an amazing assortment of studio photographs spanning over a century. Within a decade of photography’s invention, we learn, studios were so plentiful and popular here that by the late 1850s European suppliers were hard put to keep up with Calcutta’s demand for photographic chemicals. Soon, even women in purdah had the option of going to “zenana” studios where barefaced Englishwomen would take their portraits. The “ladies of good birth” posed in full maharani regalia or other traditional finery—or in daring western costume with tiaras, posies, pointy heels and dainty parasols. Fantasy had come to town—and to India—riding on a glass plate negative.
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.
Studio photography here is characterised by a curious mix of nostalgia on the one hand and a desire to move forward on the other. This often expresses itself in startling ways: next door to a studio that offers only a tattered Taj Mahal is one that boasts a new and popular backdrop reflecting a rather topical event (then less than six months old)—a skyscraper complex in flames, with one plane crashed into its left side and several more approaching from the right! This rendering with painterly licence of a too familiar event has an oddly unperturbed foreground—a white bungalow with sloping red roofs, set amid green lawns on which are arranged white garden chairs and a table. A bank of treetops shelters this idyllic scene from the drama overhead.
Inside a cubbyhole barely large enough for his office desk and chair, portly studio owner Hyder Ali sorts through a prolific clutter of colour prints and delivery envelopes. He speaks genially but forcefully, looking over his reading glasses at us. “You’re from Bombay, why do you want to make a film on our poor studios? There’s nothing special to be found here.” When we say we’ve never come across anything like this WTC backdrop, he is even more deprecatory. “All the junk ends up here,” he proclaims. “India is the world’s dumping ground, and Calcutta is the junkyard of India!”
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 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.
Meanwhile customers come and go, happy to pose before the spectacle of the doomed twin towers, neither bemused by it nor amazed. It is as if this is more or less as it should be—different enough perhaps, colourful enough, possibly “modern” enough. Just like the backdrop we find in another Kolkata studio, of the Vidyasagar Setu, the impressive new bridge across the Hooghly. Why paint this bridge and pose before it when you have the real one close by? Perhaps in this “city of dreadful night”—unforgiving, unforgivable words that have passed into the collective subconscious—it should not really surprise us that people cling to each fresh sign of vitality. And so they praise their efficient Metro, and celebrate their magnificent suspension bridge.
We wonder if studios in Agra, too, offer backdrops of the Taj.
Apparently, the only people who don’t care for these scenic or dramatic backdrops and ask for plain colours instead are the “educated” customers—by which term studio staff everywhere refer to us English-speaking or otherwise elite-seeming types. This oft-repeated observation is brought home to us weeks later, when we walk into an Ahmedabad studio where synthetic rocks and artificial plants have been used to create a lush indoor garden, complete with pond. Our wanting a photo of ourselves in this setting makes the owner suspicious. Not yet apprised of our honourable intentions, he interprets our request as ridicule and lets us know we are not welcome.
Such inhospitality is rare. Most studios roll up their shutters and unroll their backdrops for us, and in many little and major ways let us do as we please when we return to shoot. But there is one notable exception.
We first arrive in Kolkata on a day that happens to be the Bengali New Year, and find only one studio open for business. This upmarket place in a posh part of town caters to the well-heeled. No painted backdrops here, nor even colour. We are in the classy domain of black-and-white portraits, but the owner-photographer and his work both suggest a time warp that typifies the city and fascinates us. Not particularly keen on non-customers like us, he does not welcome paying clients either. While we converse with him, a woman enters to have her photo taken. He tells her curtly—and untruthfully—that he’s closed for the day. “I charge 400 for a passport photo that anyone else will give you for 25 rupees,” he grumbles, “and I keep raising my prices, but still they keep coming.” Why does this disgust him? He doesn’t ever give a straight answer, but cannot stop talking. Railing, actually. Against the hypocrisy of people here: of daughters-in-law who touch their mothers-in-law’s feet but curse them behind their backs, unlike Steffi Graf who had the courage to have a baby out of wedlock; of men who drive up in fancy cars to attend classical music concerts only to spend the time there striking business deals over their mobile phones. He says his true clientele, the middle class, is dead.
Perhaps when a way of life passes, nostalgia becomes a way of life.
Reluctantly, he brings out his work to show us, protesting that it’s worthless but evidently proud of it. He tells us he trained in Germany (which almost explains the Steffi Graf non sequitur) and knows he would have been appreciated in New York—but a shadow falls as he hints at unnamed personal problems that kept him here among the philistines. His work is technically brilliant but dated; very good pictures rubbing corners with trying-to-be-arty ones. Twice we visit, and twice he refuses to let us shoot him or his photographs. Yet he remains an unforgettable character, a man with a reputation for artistry and rudeness, with a shoulder chip and foreign bug, out of synch with his times and his art and himself. As we leave, his assistant drapes a large black cloth over the glass display window outside. Although meant simply to protect the outsize black-and-white portraits hanging there from the harsh glare of the afternoon sun, it’s a nicely symbolic act.
Somewhere we encounter an unverifiable but intriguing rumour—that many of the early, outdoor photo studios began as extensions of dentists’ clinics. We can’t see the connection, except for the fact that getting a photo taken is sometimes a bit like having a tooth pulled. Take the case of the child we see being posed on a tabletop by proud grandparents. They stand him up and then move quickly out of frame, but the boy has barely learnt to keep his balance and he topples backwards, falling out of sight with a noisy crash. He is largely unhurt but screams his surprised lungs out, while his guilty guardians cajole and console. I imagine this child growing up with the kind of dark, glowering suspicion of photo studios and photographers that we usually reserve for doctors and dentists.
But there may be a less fanciful connection. To let your unblurred image form on the coated surface of the early glass negatives you had to keep as still as deep water for a long time. They even had head clamps to hold you immobile, just the sort of thing with which a dentist’s chair comes equipped. You stared into the unfamiliar lens, statue-like and unblinking, while your heart raced with excitement or dread. No wonder many of the early poseurs appear stiff and uneasy. That they voluntarily submitted to the ordeal shows the lengths to which they were prepared to go, to obtain these tokens of themselves that were so much more satisfying than any mirror image.
Even now, when film speeds are much faster and we can afford to let our bodies relax and our lips hazard a smile just a split second before the click, some primeval fear seems to linger. We’re wholly in the power of someone—and something—else. The Photographer rearranges our hair and repositions our faces, coaxing and chivvying us into submission; as for the Photograph, who knows what it might not reveal about our deepest selves? We negotiate with the lens, buying time, putting our best face forward, or we try to fool it by disguising ourselves as people we’d like to be. Then, peeved or pleased with the results, we come back for more, acquiring along the way a whole portfolio of alter egos.
“Whose pose is that?”
“Hrithik Roshan’s.”
“Really? I’d say it’s more Salman Khan.”
“Ok, make it Salman then,” says Junaid, the skinny youth with chiselled features who has come in for a macho-making session. His shirt is off as he flexes his biceps and stares intently into the lens, unmindful of the fact that there are more ribs showing than muscles rippling. Obviously he’s a regular, for the photographer harangues him mercilessly, “Can’t you hold that pose…Will you stop looking down at the floor…Don’t glare so hard!” It’s a seedy studio in a rundown locality bordering a red light area, but many stars have come from humbler beginnings. Who’s to say that Junaid might not make it too, one of these days?
Out of nowhere, the boy’s mother appears, pleading and confiding. “He doesn’t listen to me, sister…please talk to him…I’m a poor woman…he doesn’t earn…takes money from me to spend on drugs…tell him to stop.”
All we can do is sympathise with her. The youth’s too thin frame and spacey manner are now explained. Also, we sense how much the posing and the photos must mean to him. So that when there’s a bit of cash left over from his more usual high, he comes into the studio for another kind of fix.
It’s not just other selves that the chamber of dreams allows you to create, but other lives as well. Imtiaz is a regular at Muskan Studio, but no obeying the man behind the camera for him. Instead, he sits with the man before the computer screen and directs a whole sequence of romantic fantasies. Thanks to the ubiquitous Photoshop, backdrops and other embellishments—clouds, waterfalls, favourite deities, hearts, butterflies—are all available at the click of a mouse. Wedding albums can now be tailor-made to suit your taste in scenic grandeur or special effects. It’s a whole new world.
And what this ardent young man likes to do is design composite images, known in the trade as “joint couple” or “trick couple” photos, from separate pictures of his girlfriend and himself. Completely engrossed in asking Aijaz, the technician, to place a rose here or change the angle of a face there, he answers our questions shyly but frankly. The girl is not allowed to go out with him, so they exchange photos—and other love tokens—clandestinely. He hopes one day to marry her. Against hope. He’s Muslim and she’s Hindu—he doesn’t say so, but her name suggests as much; besides, her special name for him is Raj, and that’s the name he has Aijaz put next to hers on each image of togetherness that the two men so carefully conjure up, against the less visible but nonetheless palpable backdrop of recent communal violence in Ahmedabad, their city.
Aijaz, far from being a mechanical operator, is full of creative suggestions and objections, banter and empathy. How can you stay unmoved when a young man, whose love story you know is not heading towards a happy ending, asks if you can make his face and his beloved’s appear like stars in the sky above the Taj Mahal? The Photoshop man is privy to the other’s most secret fantasies in a way that even the best of friends seldom are, and he enters completely into the spirit of the thing. It’s an entirely different approach from that of the guy who was hectoring poor Junaid, yet both studio men are nothing less than experienced professionals trying to do a good job.
Muskan Studio, run by Aijaz’s brother Riyaz, is in a mainly Muslim locality on the east side of the Sabarmati river. Not far from it was the Shah Alam camp, the largest of the shelters for the thousands who fled their burning and looted homes at the height of the attacks on their community just a few months earlier. Now people have returned home and an ersatz peace prevails. Business at Muskan is not too bad, considering—or is it because?—this is one of the least affluent areas of the city. It may be that the less you have, the more you hope.
When the studio had to down shutters during curfew hours, Riyaz went about taking pictures of the rioting and its aftermath. He shows us these images, of still smoking localities and the wounded on stretchers and the crowds in the camps. Among this record of devastation is a series that intrigues us—very deliberately posed photos of women and men staring into the lens as they stand before the debris of their homes. These were taken, Riyaz tells us, to be filed along with compensation claims. Even the local maulvi, usually against the un-Islamic practice of image-making, had to pose for such a photo because he too suffered some damage to his home!
These portraits that lie at the other end of the spectrum from role playing and fantasy contain ironies enough to keep our minds working overtime, but that exercise has to wait—because just then Farhana Apa arrives with her daughter Seema. Riyaz introduces us, and instantly Farhana adopts us. We are invited to her home to eat, to meet her other daughter Amina, and to look at all their photos. But first the mother-daughter duo flips through the album of Amina’s recent wedding. Seema, a teenager, complains that everywhere her eyes are closed. Farhana turns on Riyaz, who was the wedding photographer, and demands to know why he’s “closed the poor girl’s eyes” in all the pictures. Riyaz repeats her question aloud in mock wonder.
On the street as we walk home with them, Seema, who wears a black burqa, veils her face. It’s a choice the young girl has made for herself, apparently. Her mother wears a salwar kameez, dupatta round her head. We go through narrow lanes, past hawkers selling plates of cut fruit and ice golas. Women sit in groups in the doorways of their homes, cleaning grain or simply chatting. Farhana seems to know everybody, and many people greet her. She tells us about her work as agent of a small savings scheme, which has helped her to make friends with everyone around while earning her good commissions. These allow her to indulge her hobby, of having her daughters (it used to be herself) endlessly photographed, on every festival or occasion, in every new dress, in an endless variety of poses.
“Photo paadna,” they call it here; elsewhere it’s nikaalna, utaarna, lena, khinchna. No wonder we’ve enriched the limited English for it too—by getting our photos “removed”. Her brother’s a mullah and frowns upon it all, confides Farhana, but he’s also the younger sibling; she refuses to take him seriously enough to change her ways.
Her older daughter Amina, who lives next door, soon joins us. All of 19, a few months pregnant, obviously the family beauty in a family where the competition is very close, she is the true inheritor of her mother’s photo passion, as album after album testifies. Here she is in a boat, five girls standing behind her, their arms flung out wide in Titanic fashion. Here she’s holding a white dove. Here she’s with her best friend in a pose that mimics a popular film poster—she points to the kajal she’s skillfully lined her friend’s eyes with, on the print itself. Her most prized photo is the one of herself as jalpari, a water nymph beside a lake. She tells us that the ideas, poses, and directions to the amateur or professional photographers were all her own.
When some photos are slid out of their plastic slots in the album, they reveal other photos, pin-up pictures of favourite film stars, underneath. In one, Amina has cut out the heroine’s face and inserted her own, so that it is she who is now in the hero’s embrace. It’s an expertly done job.
The cramped living conditions in the one-room house seem at odds with how well all three women are dressed. It is a neat room, however, with things stored and stacked to create maximum space. Seema—no longer in her burqa—pulls out various albums from their places. She too is in many of the photographs, and interjects her own comments from time to time.
There is nothing of the shy bride of the wedding photographs we saw earlier in these pictures of Amina; nothing of the burqa’s inhibition in the pictures of Seema. We begin to get a sense of a rich fantasy life and of a whole parallel world of photographs that the sisters possess and in some ways live in.
When we come back some months later to shoot City of Photos, Amina has had twin boys and lost a lot of weight. Her husband, whom we never meet but keep hearing about, is against the idea of her being in a film. Afraid of causing friction, we are prepared—most reluctantly—to back out, but Farhana won’t hear of it. Unfazed for years by her brother the mullah, she refuses to be cowed down now by a mere son-in-law who owns a meat shop. “You are my friends,” she declares, “and you’ll shoot with my daughter in my home.” Riyaz is prevailed upon to speak to the man, for whose benefit a white lie is invented—that we’re here to do a film on twins and are mainly filming the babies. Curious neighbours who might tattle are kept at bay by a closed door.
Not yet twenty-one, Amina talks wistfully of the good old days—of school picnics and other fun occasions. We are moved by the discovery that her husband has never seen these photos, nor will he if she can help it, because “he’d just tear them up”. This knowledge brings with it a sense of loss—what this gifted, graceful girl might have made of her life in other circumstances—and responsibility—how we can never let the film be shown on Indian television, for example.
Outside the warmth of Farhana’s home and hospitality, the city depresses us with its dusty, unrelieved urban stretches. Wandering through Bapunagar, a mini-township of immigrants from the rural hinterland who work in the diamond cutting industry, we pass through seedy streets of small lookalike shops, their exteriors hung with rows of human heads swaying in the noonday sun, upping the ghoulishness ante in a place already synonymous with murder. These are mannequin faces, meant to be attached to the necks of garments on display but as yet unbodied and unclothed. Among these bleak streets we stumble upon an occasional “garden studio”, including the one whose proprietor was less than enthusiastic for our custom.
Maybe half an artificial garden is better than none. When nature goes out of people’s lives, only to make such a backdoor entry, it can do little more than reflect its own absence.
Everywhere, for that matter, absences feed the fantasy machine. Magic is routinely performed in these often shabby surroundings, uniting you with a beloved or making you a movie star or transporting you to a faraway land or setting you up with a beautiful home, all ordinarily beyond your reach. Miracles happen too, as when a dead man is brought back to life, open eyes restored to his sightless face under the photographer-painter’s skilled hands.
Here it’s the blank of greenery that is sought to be filled in, even as the developing city pushes it out. To our heat-struck eyes, these hothouse attempts at grace are beginning to seem like over-compensation when the humbling moment occurs. A shy young man comes in with his even shyer, very new bride dressed in all her finery and jewellery. Obviously immigrants barely arrived in the city, they are accompanied by an equally young but savvy relative who does all the talking. It’s a truly special occasion, maybe the first time the couple will pose for a studio photo together. What better setting than this avenue of trees, even if it’s wallpaper, and this little arbor, so what if the flowers that fringe it are plastic?
Not everyone, though, is content with such scenes of paradise lost. After a while, even nature gets boring. Taj Mahals no longer entice us, snow peaks and country villas lose their charm, pushing us to seek new thrills…like the raging cyclone of Orissa, with people and animals scrambling for shelter. Like the Bihar train collision, bogeys suspended precariously from a broken bridge. Like the burning towers of New York, where airplanes fly too low for comfort. It’s all there, take your pick—natural calamity, appalling accident, manmade horror.
And yet Prabir Da, painter of backdrops who specialises in these images of devastation, is a gentle, soft-spoken man who finds sermons in stones. As he paints storm-tossed boats, and people and animals huddled together above rising flood waters, he says simply, “When Nature vents her fury, humans, snakes and dogs all come together for shelter. Nobody’s anyone’s enemy then.” Asked why he thinks people enjoy posing against such disasters, he points out, without irony, that they can’t always go to the original spot to witness these unusual events.
Of course it’s true that in real life too, people gather at crime and accident scenes, but morbid curiosity does not explain the attraction of these painted disasters. Though based on actual events, they are drained of their tragedy and made to look almost beautiful. Certainly there are no dead bodies visible. It’s as if, deleting what disturbs, we are content to retain the empty forms—rendering horror spectacular, and spectacles mundane.
Between Calcutta and Ahmedabad, then, we find people, places and photos enough for more than one film, but our own city of Bombay also yields up a few reluctant treasures. We do the rounds of over twenty studios, scattered all over the city, and come across much that is of interest—hand-tinted photographs, exquisite black-and-white studies of old film stars, cutouts of recent ones with whom one may pose, studio ambiences that are as much relics of the past as the prints hanging on the walls. We don’t eventually shoot here, but one bizarre encounter does make it to a draft of our script…
An old Mubarak Begum hit song being sung.
A wall hung from top to bottom with large framed photo portraits, dating back to the fifties and earlier, many of them hand-tinted with watercolour. Superimposed on the portraits, reflected in the glass of their frames, is the Bombay street outside with passersby and traffic.
Cut to the street. Just across is a signboard saying Chitra Photo Studio. The singing continues.
Inside the studio, tilt down from a painting of Hitler that hangs in pride of place to the man behind the counter. He is the one singing the old song, impersonating the nasal female voice. He finishes the antara, laughs, and proudly names various other singers whom he can mimic.
“Why do you have this painting of Hitler?” we want to know.
“Any problem?” he asks.
Must there be meaning? Just because we have eyes? From Susan Sontag, who wrote so wisely about the relationship between photographs and people, some last words: “Images transfix. Images anaesthetise.”