Raqs Media Collective

Notational Photography

Photographic images come at us not as static presences, but as kinetic elements, as a set of kinetic envelopes; they flicker on to light boxes, television screens, computer terminals and mobile phones. Wherever we look, there are photographs - as fetishes, as memorabilia, as ornaments, as seductions, as instruments of governance, as items of evidence in police reports and newspaper stories - in posters for missing and wanted people stuck to the surface of a wall, in a newspaper or a pulp magazine, or as advertisements on the curving surfaces of a metro station. The photograph and the photographically inflected object has a very different status from the commemorative or iconic function that it might have had at an earlier time.

Photographs, stored in hard drives, deleted and catalogued repeatedly, scanned, resized, drained or saturated in terms of colour are both the substance and the detritus of our existence.

When detritus and substance coincide with an increasing regularity, as we would argue they do in today’s world, where somebody's urban renewal is the destruction of somebody's habitat, we are faced with an interesting dilemma. That of the impossibility of being able to make 'constitutive' images that build desired or desirable realities. The images that yield themselves to us do not in themselves create opportunities for redemption, nor do they offer utopian possibilities. Nor is it possible for us to view them as extensions of our subjectivities - a set of personal visions. We find it difficult to make images do the work of manifestos, pamphlets or diaries. What we are able to do is to make images that work as notations, that encrypt a set of rebuses. Reading such an image is reading into its absences. Just as a set of notes point to realities larger, more fulsome and complex than the mere act of their listing allows for, so too, reading a photograph that functions as notation involves knowing and understanding that what we see also contains a great deal that is amiss, that has faded, degraded, disappeared or is in a condition of distressed visibility. The less-than-visible elements in an image are just as interesting as the visible. Sometimes, in fact they may be much more arresting.

People (or numbers standing in for people) always appear as dynamic indices in demographic records. Additions are recorded, but subtractions, in a strange double erasure, fail to register themselves. They disappear, and the fact that they disappear also fails to register itself. Something similar happens with the photographic image. A picture says a great deal, but there is also a great deal that it has to be silent about. What brought a reality to rest before it could be imaged? What speeded things up to the extent that they could barely be seen? Which aspect of reality leaches into an image as residue? What gets subtracted away as the distillate?
All these are questions that images themselves are silent about. A picture might tell us who was in it, but how do we make it speak about the people who went into hiding, were removed, disappeared, or absented themselves from the portrait? How can the eye that retains the capability to airbrush reality without ever using an actual airbrush be asked to account for itself?

The tranquillity, the timeless, 'eternal present of another time'-like quality of the photographic image is only a figure of nostalgia. Photographs, especially in today's world, and particularly in their digital form, play a somewhat different role. While photographic images do continue to regard us occasionally from on high, they are at the same time ephemeral talismans that move with extraordinary rapidity, circulating through computer and mobile phone networks, within a room, a city, or across the world in a manner of seconds. Despite this new ephemerality, the "photo" - especially as rendered through photoblogs and other networked archival platforms - is at the same time probably the only remaining possible site for, or aid to, popular visual memory in a rapidly urbanizing world.


'Event Images' - Nomads of Visual Memory

Photographs, for instance the images from Abu Gh'raib, which now are tagged on to thousands of blogs do attain a certain status as instantly recognizable 'event unifiers', in that, we have all, somehow or the other, seen them; so much so that even oblique and indirect visual references to such images become instantly recognized, much as our minds would unconsciously register and tag the opening bar of a song that becomes the popular anthem of a generation. These are images that inhabit our neural cortices as nomads of visual memory; they don't have to be on paper or on a wall, they can suddenly and fleetingly make their appearance felt, and just as rapidly disappear into the visual undergrowth from whence they came.

The photograph that hangs on a wall, or adorns a mantelpiece or a family album, or is looked at with reverence in a coffee table book is indicative of a certain 'homeliness'. The photograph that zips around the world, momentarily occupying grooves in brains and machines is indicative of the image that has wings, that doesn't quite settle into a familiar or comfortable niche anywhere. It would be strange to think of such an image as 'belonging' somewhere, or to someone. It is interesting to think about what we can learn about rootless photographs by considering what we know about displaced and disappearing peoples. In recent days, looking at pictures of the Andamanese in London archives we realized that there are more pictures of the Andamanese in existence than there are actual Andamanese. And some of these pictures have a wide circulation. They appear in books, journals, postcards and artefacts. These images have a concreteness, an almost monumental solidity. The people they portrayed, however, became a set of shadowy blurs, intangible, invisible, almost not there.

The people who are displaced by history, who 'came in the way' of history become absences, gaps, holes in the record, and the fact that they are missing also often goes unrecorded. Millions of people fade from history, and often the memory of their disappearance also fades with time. With the disappearance of ways of life, entire communities and the lived experiences and memories that constituted them vanish, or are forced to become something other than what they were accustomed to have been. When they make the effort to embrace this transformation, typically, what stands questioned is their credibility. They are never what they seem to be, or what they try to say they are. The annals of every nation are full of adjectives that accrue to displaced communities and individuals that begin to be seen as cheats, forgers, tricksters, frauds, thieves, liars and impostors, as members of ‘criminal castes, tribes and clans’ or as deviant anomalies who habitually attempt to erode the stable foundations of the state and settled, civilized life with their 'treacherous' ambiguities and their evasive refusal to be confined, enumerated, or identified.

The Photograph as Instrument of Governance

The origins of photography in India, like in many other parts of the world, had to do with a triumphant Imperial vision using a scopic technology to define a landscape and identify a diverse population. Much of this had to do with confinement, enumeration and identification. Like maps and land records, photographs too, were conscious attempts at expressing a visual mastery over people and landscapes. Over the past few weeks, we have been working in various archives in London, looking especially at ethnographic and anthropometric photographs. One of the things that we have been thinking about while doing this is the time that it would have taken to take an exposure for these images. Daguerrotypes and early glass negatives, which is what a majority of the material that we are looking at are, required the 'subject' to sit or stand still for lengths of time that would try our patience today. When looking at these images, I am always struck by the fact that it would have required an elaborate apparatus of coercion and restraint to ensure that the 'Andamanese' would stand still against a grid for a length of time sufficient for an acceptable exposure. In more ways than one, taking such an image is a demand made on the photographed to deliver up a coerced passivity.

The history of passport photography is a narrative of continuing coerced passivity, of increasing constraints and restrictions on how a person might present themselves to the camera. It includes an increasing level of standardization and control over image size and focal length, as well as the variables of posture, affect, expression and demeanour. The images of yourselves that you will be required to deliver for the next generation of biometrics enabled passports will require you to not smile when you look at the camera, so as to not confuse the facial recognition parameters of the software that will be on hand to read your image.

This gets even more interesting when we realize that contemporary practices of photography are intimately tied up with the production of legal and illegal presences. Most people have to be photographed in certain ways, for certain purposes. This we know already from the passport photograph, and from forensic photography. Some spaces are prohibited by law from being photographed (like most public utilities in Delhi, which always exhibit prominent 'Photography Prohibited' signs). In many spaces, like on the metro in London, it is impossible not to be photographed, because of the ubiquity of surveillance cameras. In some spaces, like in an unauthorized or illegal urban settlement in Delhi, the presence of a person with a camera is read as an opening gambit in a maneouvre of surveying that will ultimately end with the flattening of the neighbourhood.

The surface of the photograph then has to be seen as a contested terrain. Appearing on it, or disappearing from it, is not a matter of visual whimsy, but an actual index of power and powerlessness. A careful examination of the photographs that bear portraits of 'wanted' and 'missing persons' will reveal the strangely blank, intense lack of intensity in the eyes of those who appear in these images. They are there, in the picture, but they look as if they were not there.

Those 'missing persons' who disappear, or appear with great reluctance, or against their will, and with their names, provenances, identities and histories deliberately or accidentally obscured in the narratives of 'development' and the histories of nations are to the normal processes of governance what the figure of the 'unknown soldier' is to the reality of war. The only difference is, there are no memorials to those who fade from view in the ordinary course of life.

The missing person is a blur against a wall, a throw- away scrap of newspaper with a fading, out-of-focus image of a face, a peeling poster announcing rewards for wanted or lost people in a police post or railway station waiting room, a decimal point in a statistic, an announcement that some people somewhere have been disowned or abandoned or evicted or deported or otherwise cast away, as residues of history. No flags flutter, no trumpets sound, nothing burns eternal in the memory of a blur.

The Blur

Missing presences can be marked only be inferences, by allusions that can occur when you bring two and two together and realize that you have only three. Things do not add up as they should.

A November night just outside the Inter state bus terminus in Delhi some years ago. Around us is the clamour and activity of construction workers building the metro on their night shift. The orange light of sodium vapour lamps, dust from the metro building site hanging suspended in the air, a certain combination of temperature, humidity and pollution and a man in a hurry to catch a long distance bus - all of these combined to make this blur. What this image asks of us is a series of questions about speed, illumination, presence and intention. Is this a man running away or coming towards a camera? Is this a city going to sleep or coming alive? Is this an apocalyptic night or an eclipsed day?

Any answer to these questions could open a door to a new thought about a city caught within a vortex of transformation, yet not a single answer could satisfy all our curiosities. Consider this image as a residue of the building of the Delhi metro. There could be thousands of other such images, each demanding a little of our attention, competing with a million other images, attempting to salvage some regard in a universe filled with visual distractions.

Sometimes the only way you have to understand or interpret these insubstantial residues of our times is to construct a collage that takes whatever fragments are available - incomplete, torn, eroded as they may be - and arrange them so that the palimpsest they form makes a few tantalizing concessions towards a qualified, layered decipherment.

At first glance, the figure of a blur is indicative of the fact that the subject being photographed is moving within the picture plane at a speed faster than the shutter speed of the camera. The blur is a consequence of a photographic move opposite to the Imperious gaze that commanded stillness on the part of its subjects. It suggests a photographer who is ‘slower’ than the figure she seeks to represent. Here, the image is not an index of the image-maker's authority but often a reflection of their vulnerability.

With modern cameras, the blur signifies less than perfect light conditions. The combination of speed and illumination in urban spaces constantly creates blurs, and some of these are visible even to the naked eye, as for instance when looking out of the windows of underground trains as they rapidly leave a metro station. The aesthetic of the fleeting, which refuses to be arrested, suggests a distressed, and perhaps disguised visibility.

Svetalana Boym, a photographer and media artist while speaking of blurs, says, "The blurs on the image are photographic errors, nostalgia for what photography could never be, longing for cinema. Yet photography shouldn't become as garrulous as a film. It offers an elliptic narrative without a happy ending. Its fleeting narrative potentialities would never find their scriptwriters and producers. There would always be a cloud or two, a crack on the surface of the picture, a short shadow that evades the plot."

What is this relationship that I am trying to arrive at when speaking of the subject, who while ambling along at walking speed still manages to move faster than the shutter speed of a camera in available light. What is it that I am trying to evoke in this meditation on representation, and absence, or that which goes missing, which streaks, blurs, disappears out of a picture?

Preface to A Ghost Story

'Preface to A Ghost Story' is one of a series of photo-anti-romans (phantiromans) that Raqs works on from time to time. A phantiroman is the shadow of a photo-roman. A photo-roman is a popular sequential text-image form that lies at the intersection of comics, story telling and photography. It is often to be found in pulp serial literary vehicles such as crime weeklies, porn, sentimental romantic magazines, and popular devotional stories. It carries within it the memory of the story telling techniques of the silent cinema and the cheap romance of newsprint. The photo-roman uses the convention of a set of photographic images (some of which may be set ups involving actors) placed in a particular order, with accompanying text to string together a narrative. The photo-anti-roman (abbreviated to 'phantiroman'), in contrast to the more sentimental or sensational tenor of the photo-roman, uses photographs of found situations and objects in tandem with a terse textual register to construct narratives with darker, more melancholic or ironic undertones.

'Preface to A Ghost Story' is a phantiromanic exploration in the form of a recursive narrative that centres on the figure of the 'unknown citizen'. In this anticipation of what might have been a story, we witness a situation involving an 'unknown citizen' who is seen leaping from a building to an untimely conclusion. The images and words that embody the narrative is contained within a bag, which itself makes an appearance at the end of the sequence. This 'preface' invites us to unravel the threads of many possible stories, each with their resident ghost of some unknown citizen.

(images from the Preface to the Ghost Story)

Walter Benjamin, in his 'Short History of Photography' written in 1931, spoke conspiratorially of photographs as indices of 'scenes of a crime' saying (prophetically, though he was unaware of his prophecies, made alive today by mobile phone cameras) that, "the camera is getting smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture fleeting and secret moments whose images paralyse the associative mechanisms in the beholder". This led in his view to a situation wherein "photography turns all life's relationships into literature". If we take this view seriously we have to consider photography first of all as the literature of the relationship between visibility and obscurity, and as a commentary on the tension that binds the barely visible to our retinal surfaces.