Photographs as history

Over the last 30 years, the bibliography of books on colonial photography, by the British as well as native photographers, has become quite long. The earliest was The Last Empire: Photography in British India, 1855-1911 by Clark Worswick and Ainslee T. Embree (Aperture, 1976); since then, many more publications have accompanied landmark curatorial projects, significantly advancing the study of photography in colonial India. The Marshall Albums is part of this effort and the Alkazi Collection should be commended for continuing to publish, with remarkable consistency, its vast archive and creating opportunities for extending research.

PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION

Since the 1980s, Subaltern Studies, its re-inscription of the colonial experience from the perspective of the oppressed and the dominated, semiotics, and the politics of representation have affected what scholars choose to study. The colonial experience and the creation of popular culture, both for the imperialist and the native, have brought photography centre stage. Not only is photography the “primary documentation”, it is also the first modern industrial technology of representation that grew hand in hand with Euro-American empire-building and with popular demands for images that could be acquired, circulated, and thus created opportunities for self-representation to the under-represented classes of people and objects.

Full report here Hindu

Customised photobooks breathe life into photo biz

The Great Indian Wedding still has all the swish, colour, camera, lights and action, but one thing’s noticeably different: The way the story is told.

Memories of the event are no longer bound to garish, unwieldy photo albums that are later shipped to family. Version 2.0 of the wedding album’s here, and photos are set in slick ‘photobooks,’ complete with visual effects and customised packaging.

The killer application is changing the way photographs are printed, giving shape to a nascent industry. In its own quiet way, it is also breathing life into a dying photo printing industry. You can create a photobook for just about any occasion: a family holiday or get-together, baby’s first year or even a tribute to your favourite grandparent. In the ‘all-occasion photobook’, you get to design your photobook and add captions to make it more personalised.

All you need to do is email the photos, and have the photobook delivered to you.

Full report here Economic Times

Darkness at dawn

As the nation revels in the spirit of Independence, Pramod Kapoor strikes a note of sobriety with his new book that exposes the dark side of Partition

A partition shot from Witness to Life and Freedom:
Margaret Bourke-White in India and Pakistan

‘Margaret, you can always be proud that you were invited into the world.' These were the words of Minnie Bourke, an Irish Orthodox Christian, to her daughter. The girl lived up to the invitation, carving out her own niche as a celebrated photojournalist who documented some of the most cataclysmic events history has seen. Margaret, though, was not your everyday, hard-nosed, dispassionate observer of events. She was moved by the plight of millions as India's tryst with freedom was marred by horrific riots, loss of life and limb, as millions moved across the Indo-Pak border.

Margaret clicked pictures of a woman breastfeeding her baby even as she crosses the border sitting on a donkey, of a torso being nibbled at by a stray dog next to the railway track, of an old man carrying a woman on his shoulders, of a body, nude waist downwards for obvious reasons, being lifted to a truck, and those of scores of swollen bodies, caught in the fury of the Beas floods. The immensely disturbing photographs would have remained just that, but for Pramod Kapoor, well known as the publisher of Roli Books, but now in serious danger of being identified as a collector of historical records and photographs. Kapoor though, is modest as ever. “Doing research and being a collector is what I really enjoy. I have been into vintage material study for close to a decade now. It all started with my book on maharajahs, something that has been very well received by the market. Then I did a book on New Delhi, and this one kind of naturally came through.” This “one” is called “Witness to Life and Freedom: Margaret Bourke-White in India and Pakistan”. A largely pictorial venture, the book calls upon the reader to display both wisdom and courage.

Full report here Hindu

History as it was made

For Life magazine’s photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White —  the first woman correspondent during World War II, the first American to get an official entry into the Soviet Union as well as one of the very few women photographers in pre-Partition 1940s India — going into the books seemed like a habit. She travelled across India and Pakistan between 1947 and 1948 and got some of her finest shots in places and at moments she least expected.

Witness To Life And Freedom:
Margaret Bourke-White In India And Pakistan
Ed by Pramod Kapoor
Roli; Rs 595; Pp 144 

Witness To Life And History is an expansive repository of her works at a time when emotions were running high and one man’s patriotism was another man’s bloodletting. Publisher Pramod Kapur has sifted through Bourke-White’s photographs and has brought us an excellent visual documentary. Along with a moving foreword by Gopalkrishna Gandhi, an opening essay by Vicki Goldberg, Bourke-White’s biographer, provides a textual harness to the book.

Apart from capturing the horrors of the Partition, Bourke-White captures the ‘ordinary’ emotions of people in extraordinary times. Her photos aren’t just about documenting the pains of a birth of a nation. They are also expressions of human emotions that are familiar some 63 years after they were first displayed.

Full report here