0. BS and Power Play
I will remember 9 Dec 2018 for its eerie silence. Only 24 hours earlier, I was a solo male supporter at a political action committee aimed at getting more women elected to India's parliament in the upcoming elections. Less than 24 hours later, I'd find myself in a messy battle of wits to defend any feminist credentials I had ever had. In the interim, I was alerted to the instagram blog Scene & Herd whose self-assigned mandate was to “[cut] through BS in the Indian Art world, one predator and power play, at a time.” That Sunday, two ‘women’ anonymously claimed in two separate posts that they felt harassed when ‘a Bangalore-based photographer’ approached them ‘repeatedly’ to participate in a photo project called Forbidden Love.
Although I wasn’t actually named in the accusations, direct reference to my most visible body of work, The African Portraits, made it obvious that I was the person being alluded to. I decided to acknowledge these accusations the very next morning in a public response which to this day remains accessible online. It was imperfect, as I am imperfect, but it was noted by women and men for its plainspeak and honesty. However, the situation rapidly spiralled into something unexpected. Suchitra Vijayan, chief polemicist at the polis project, a fledgling New York-based activism group, saw fertile ground to pursue an agenda. Using lawyerly tactics, she got needlessly argumentative and took umbrage to everything I said. By hook and/or by crook, she was out to make an example of me.
A barrister by training (at the same privileged halls in London as Gandhi and Nehru long before her), Suchitra deployed considerable resources over the next two months to prepare a case fit to be heard in court—the court of public opinion. On 1 Feb 2019 the polis project published a 5,000-word ‘autopsy’ of my response. Ten days later, they followed it up with a 10,000-word ‘critique’ of The African Portraits, which somebody then described as “a brilliant essay on racism, fetishisation, representation, consent, and Mahesh Shantaram’s photography.” (It was far from brilliant.) A friend called me up in the middle of the night and insisted that my wife be by my side while I read it.
Wars are fought over narratives.
The pièce de résistance of the article was the story of one Alexis Ward, an African-American woman whose nude portrait I had made at a terrace nightclub in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh in September 2016. I remember the encounter to be perfectly cordial and consensual. A month later, however, Alexis had indeed requested me not to make the image public. While I genuinely believed I could continue to retain it as part of my portfolio, it should not have stayed online. I immediately reached out to Alexis to explain myself and make amends while assuring her that neither was the image ever sold on any platform nor was it implied to be on sale.
Wars are fought over narratives. The story of Alexis Ward was an invidious narrative that became central to Suchitra’s Masters-level thesis that extrapolated truths and exaggerated untruths. The polis project would use it to run a public shaming campaign under the garb of public-spirited journalism. Anyone who saw their work as purely intellectual critique should explain to me the professional cancellation and social ostracisation that followed. In writing this essay to debunk those claims, I’ve had to relive those moments many times over.
Despite all this, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge some valid questions that were raised in the article: “What do such projects give back to the community? What knowledge do they add? What learnings, if any, are passed on to the society where the image is made?” Was this yet another case of using “the banality of bearing witness as an excuse to produce extractive work?” Was it one more in “a long history of photographing and projecting black bodies as sites of victimhood?” I want to answer these questions in the detail they deserve. I also want to do one other thing that is rarely done—let the ‘black bodies’ speak for themselves.
It has been nearly two years since the polis project’s cruel interventions. I’ve used this time to gain some perspective. Learnings from the study of criticism and controversy that an art-documentary project on racism has attracted is too good to waste. I believe the response to a 15 kiloword critique warrants an essay of this length. With this much placed back in the court of public opinion, I seek to reclaim the lost humour in my life and the ability to refocus on wholly creative pursuits once again.
1. Introducing The African Portraits
The personal project is political. Long-term documentary photography is a sustained research process, the means to an end that results in subjective knowledge, opinion and reflection. And if a story's worth lies in its telling, then the storytellers and their individual perspectives are just as valuable as the story itself. How far then does one go in search of a calling? The American modernist photographer Paul Strand once said, “The Artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” And yet, Strand travelled to a faraway continent to produce his last major work, Ghana: An African Portrait.
It was not 9/11 or 26/11, but I clearly remember that morning when I read the news. A group of African students, including a Tanzanian woman, was attacked by a mob that was enraged by another unrelated accident involving a Sudanese man. The woman in the group was disrobed in some versions of the story. When she climbed aboard a passing bus to escape the scene, she was pushed back into the mob. The Tanzanian woman incident of February 2016 was subject to some insensitive treatment by Indian media. In one case, the editor of a news website conducted an interview with the woman only to retract it later. Consequently, her story does not exist in her own words. In any case, that week was unique in India for generating discussion, either by commission or by omission, about racism in India.
“To date there are few efforts even among artists and intellectuals to address this issue of blatant racism so rampant in India and among Indians abroad. The work of Bengaluru-based photographer Mahesh Shantaram is an exception.”
– Dr. Jael Silliman in The Hindu
We were barely getting warmed up when, a week later, the whole country rode onto the next wave in the Indian news cycle. Whereas news journalism could dump one set of unanswered questions and move on to the next so quickly, the pace and depth of a personal project made slow, steady and sustained engagement possible. The African Portraits was the personal project that came of that conviction. The journey of a thousand miles had only begun. I hopped onto my motorcycle and headed out to the peripheral suburbs to know the truth for myself.
Over the next year, this resulted in many new friendships and became a deeply personal project. The original intent of this project is best introduced in the statement that convinced the jury of the 2018 Alkazi Foundation Photobook Grant award:
“A Portrait of Racism in India” (working title only)
On the night of January 31st, 2016, a horrific mob attack on a Tanzanian woman in Bangalore sent shockwaves across India’s conscience. When the incident made it to the news four days later, it exposed the ugly truth about racism and xenophobia in India, and our pitiful inability to confront it. I wanted to find out the truth for myself and draw my own conclusions. This went on to become a year-long, nationwide study of the experiences of the black African diaspora in India. As I made friends along the way, I also made photographic portraits to preserve the encounters.
The personal project simply titled ‘The African Portraits’ received much attention in 2016-17 in Indian and foreign media for directly and creatively engaging with the invisible subject of racism. It was reasonably successful in holding up a mirror to Indian society. Now, I wish to publish the work in the form of a photo-text book that will allow it to exist as a memory and an object of reference. The book marries together the portraits made over a period of 15 months and a 4000-word text written for an upcoming academic publication on Indo-African relations.
Much of my work as a documentary photographer has revolved around engaging with the idea of contemporary Indian society and culture. “A Portrait of Racism…” marks my foray into both photographic portraiture and art-activism.
The portraits lush and beautiful, the texts revealing, said one of the judges, Gauri Gill. After two months of sleuthing, the polis project came up with this: “no context, history, engagement, or articulation of how their presence in India shapes their understanding of race, racism, and racial violence.”
2. A Nocturnal Process
In recent years, maybe due to the profusion of mobile phone imagery, I began using the tripod to deliberately slow down my process. Shooting at night further brought it to a crawl. Many of these portraits were set in scenes shrouded in pitch darkness with only a sliver of light from a passing 100cc motorcycle or a zero-watt bulb for ambient illumination.
Even before consciously registering the idea of a long-term project, I made portraits of the very first Africans I met. The act of photography for me is to insure my memory. I don’t photograph experiences that I want to forget. And I almost never forget experiences that I photograph. We talk (I listen) for hours. And then the making of the portrait punctuates our conversation, signifying the beginning of a beautiful friendship. There will be ample time to develop the story later.
The simple act of making these pictures at night unifies several processes—technical, aesthetic, and social. Nobody would think twice about my aesthetic choice had I set these portraits by day. But the light of day is cheap. It describes everything, leaving no room for mystery. In a world of image overload, how do I get you to look and wonder? The protagonists of this story reside in an India where it is perpetually night. However, far from being a threatening space, the night offers the security of a warm blanket. Animation is suspended in the dead of night. There is no shoot-and-run. The need to make sharp pictures with great depth-of-field means one has to sit rock-steady for exposures as long as 15 seconds. This creates a unique dependency—without their utmost patience, cooperation, and willingness, there can be no success. One could say a layer of consent is built into each of these portraits.
“How these men and women were staged in potentially disturbing ways on landscapes marked by violence.” What irony that these portraits were made in and around people's own homes.
People tend to think logically about the construction of an image and ideologically about its intent. It’s a fun exercise but they will be misled. It is interesting and amusing how the decision to make these pictures at night has sent amateur critics into a tizzy; they’ve read all sorts of meanings into this, including ‘sexual repression’.
A particular moment for me in Suchitra’s critique was her concern about “how these men and women were staged in potentially disturbing ways on landscapes marked by violence.” What irony that these portraits were made in and around people’s own homes—their bedrooms, living rooms, terraces, on the street outside their homes. These are their safe spaces. The idea for the image would always emanate from our conversations and be inspired by the qualities of the space we occupied.
3. The Medium is the Message
In terms of audience building, when fighting the good fight, you have to take what you get. In the end, I got print, I got op-eds, I got air time, I got gallery shows and whatnot. But all that was in the end. In the beginning, I almost burnt out trying to get my work published. There was no interest during times of peace. Then, three months into shooting and sharing stories on facebook, an incident broke out in New Delhi: the murder of Olivier Kitanda. This would have dramatic implications and put the Indo-African relationship to the test on multiple levels. Now my phone started ringing.
In June 2016, my Indian gallery Tasveer approached me with a proposal. Tasveer’s founder Abhishek Poddar, who has seen me grow since my toddler days in photography, called The African Portraits the most important body of work I’ve ever produced. One artist in their upcoming season had to drop out, and that opened a window of opportunity. We knew that even if this work had little commercial potential, it was relevant and urgent for public discourse. We decided to go ahead with the show even though it was an ongoing project. That is how, ten years after I took up photography, almost as many years as I’ve been represented by Tasveer, I landed my first solo exhibition series to date. The African Portraits would travel to five cities, from Bangalore (August 2016) to New Delhi (June 2017).
As a country, we can have a conversation about our racism without ever involving the Africans. We have to recognise that our guests are only doing us a favour by holding up a mirror to our society. It is unfortunate that all too often we focus our attention on the mirror rather than the problem. Many (myself included) were put off by the excessive and shrill use of my images in the media to illustrate the plight of Africans in India. The polis project complains that my work was “one of the only widely published visual representations of the African community in India. To be their voice is a powerful position to hold for someone so insensitive.” Uh, thanks a lot. Being in the media’s searing spotlight and giving interviews is an unenviable part of the package.
“…photographs on their own are completely meaningless. Photographs only acquire meaning in context. Their meaning is then negotiated by those perceiving them while the acts of making/selecting and placing them serve as catalysts.”– Jörg M. Colberg in Conscientious
So, what is context? Is it a who-what-where caption under each image? I’m not convinced. Is it an overarching essay that accompanies the exhibition? Could be. Could it also be the politically charged climate at the time when this work is seen in galleries? For a visual artist, the image is the statement. The words that follow are merely context. Context is provided not only by what my subjects shared with me but also by how I experienced racist reactions to the project, e.g. “Mahesh, I see you’ve brought your subjects along with you?” as one visual communications educator said to me at an art gallery opening in Delhi where I had taken two Black companions along. Or, “there’s a pack of Africans here to see you,” as someone once said to me.
Colberg adds, “…photographs are made by people, and they’re made for people: photography is a form of politics. Photoland—especially the ‘art’ section with its gigantic, buffoonish pretenses—is awfully good at concealing this basic fact.” In that sense, it was audacious of Tasveer to take the risk. The exhibition series, although doomed of profitability, allowed The African Portraits to maximise its social impact.
4. Doing Time at Khoj
Reading some of the unflattering remarks made by my peers in Suchitra's article makes it relevant for me to reflect on my time at Khoj. As the longest running artist-in-residence programme in India, Khoj has built up two decades of institutional knowledge working with and supporting artists across disciplines and from around the world. For artists, it's a rite of passage of sorts. In 2016, I was a successful applicant to a residency at Khoj called the ‘Coriolis Effect: Currents across India and Africa’. In my application, I stated my expectations:
“…the residency will enable me to spend time in Delhi’s Khirkee extension, of which I have heard so much, and involve myself more closely in the lives of Africans who live there.” I also spelt out a vision for myself that “photography has become too much about photography; the audience for photography is limited to photographers. I’m hoping to break that glass ceiling and expand the audience—for racism as well as photography. The residency will give me space to think through these matters.”
In the first three weeks, I battled such a force of opposition to my work that it left me demoralised. It seemed everybody knew so much about racism and feminism! I requested individual appointments with the Khoj team as well as with my co-residents to pick their brains. These were helpful and sent me on a reading spree. Even if I didn’t readily agree with everyone, I was genuinely interested in what they had to say. To be fair, I wasn’t going to clear a certificate course in critical theory by the month-end. Diary notes I made back then reveal what I was really going through:
“…they were a bit too eager to talk down to me about my work than curious to learn about where I’m going with it… Xxxxx called my work a ‘dated anthropological view’ and ‘jarring’. Referred me to artists whose work was ‘more nuanced’.”
A bit disrespectful of my practice, I thought. The works of former residents Juan Orrantia and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (both quoted in the article) were brought to my attention in a manner of indoctrination material to be absorbed and emulated. Dattatreyan’s film Cry Out Loud was born in Khirki and spent its life in the hallowed circles of academia. I sat through it in appreciation (in an ‘A for Effort’ sort of way) of its innovation—lending the camera to his subjects every now and then to let them believe they are the filmmakers. I find anthropologists tend to sacrifice visual control at the altar of their process, and as a photographer, this is not my scene.
Orrantia’s main criticism about my work was that “it relies too much on people’s imagination, prejudices, and assumptions of Africans and their situation in India, which then become rebranded into a political appeal or call for action,” and this is said to reflect poorly on the photo industry’s inability to accept “critical interventions and positions.”
Much is made and assumed of the power and privilege that I supposedly wield. Therefore a brief, comparative introduction is in order. I: have had a speech impediment since age 5; was displaced due to war at age 13; live in India but speak no any Indian languages; put my relationships at risk by shooting off against country and caste in a conservative society; earn a living through photography alone. Orrantia: is Columbian; emigrated to South Africa; wewnt to art school in posh Hartford, Connecticut until 2019; works as an artist in his early 40s. I reached out to Orrantia through a common friend hoping to learn a little more about privilege. He did not want to talk.
“Shantaram’s series is not documentary in nature; the image itself does not give us a ‘slice of life’. Instead, the photographs seem aware of the legacy of their medium and appear generic, making little or no attempt to visually communicate their context. The narrative is created and controlled through the accompanying text, and both image and text work towards reinforcing the status of their subjects as good immigrants: people with dreams and aspirations, just like you and I.”– Blessy Augustine in her inaugural column
for The Hindu BusinessLine
Persis Taraporevala (quoted in the article) was ‘critique-in-residence’ (sic) for the Coriolis project. During one of our conversations, she suggested in all seriousness, “try leaving your camera behind… spend time with your subjects to get to know them better,” as if I didn’t do that already. She pictured me as some sort of ‘photojournalist’ with a big camera bumping off his paunch, barging into homes of suffering denizens to demand a picture. I asked twice to check if this was how she imagined me at work. “Well, you did say you never leave without your camera…” That’s where our conversation ended. Persis says the portrayal of my subjects showed them as “weaker, stripped of agency, and not capable of telling their own stories.” Again, Blessy Augustine reminds us of a widely acknowledged truth in photography, “Our reaction to a picture tells us more about who we are than about the subject.”
Persis then goes on to deliver one last gem: “I felt like I had created a Frankenstein monster. We had now taught him the language of critique, power, and representation that he would now use to manipulate, sell, and leverage these pictures.” Here, Oxford-educated Persis phding at King’s College London comes across as a condescending brahmin-in-residence who regrets passing on The Knowledge to a lesser being.
Such was my time at Khoj.
5. The Nude (or the Newd?)
In this section, I want to share my brief encounter with the person quoted as ‘Alexis Ward’ whom I have always known as Mufasa Bastet. I was introduced to her during the Khoj residency by our mutual friend. Sensing that a solo black woman traveller’s experience might count for something, I travelled from Delhi to Kasauli to speak to her. We met at the rooftop restaurant and nightclub owned by our friend’s parents. She was already familiar with my work at that point (see #) and we had further discussions over dinner, with the conversation drifting from one topic to another. I wasn’t recording, as she claims, (I never do) but would make notes of details during our interesting conversation. I instinctively knew there was a portrait to be made that night.
I don’t go into a meeting with preconceived ideas of what the pictures should look like. The idea is inspired by the content of our discussions and the space we’re in. It is a nerve-wracking process fraught with uncertainty. Sometimes there are no pictures, sometimes there are no stories, and sometimes there is no permission. I requested her to sit for a portrait in this spirit. She was kind enough to agree. That’s how we ended up shooting at the very table where we had been conversing for the last five hours. It was just past closing time and we were the last ones remaining. The nude portrait was an allusion to that well-documented Indian phenomenon of staring and what it feels like to be stared at. The image was staged to make only that point. No, she does not usually sit around naked in public places. Nor is she a smoker. If this image was objectifying women, then the objectification itself was the point of making it. If at any time during the shoot she felt uncomfortable, it was not apparent to me.
The following day, we met up again for coffee and discussed suitable captions for the image. She showed me around Kasauli before I headed back to Delhi. She messaged me a couple of days later with a caption suggestion:
Look but don’t stare Its an impolite phenomena That has left me feeling vulnerably uncomfortable
I sent her two images from the shoot. She replied:
Wow… I like them both… Very nice colors
On the day of the exhibition, printed sheets with micro-stories were made available for everyone who visited the show. This 1 : 1 correlation between images and captions is too classical for my taste, but for want of time, it was the best possible solution to represent the individuals portrayed in a popup group exhibition. I finally went with this description:
Mufasa/USA/Kasauli/2016
I met Mufasa at a happening night club up in the hills, where this portrait was made. Her message, that follows from her experience as a single, black, woman traveller in India, is: Look but don’t stare.
I categorically reject the imputation that I misrepresented ‘Alexis Ward’. If any misrepresentation has taken place, it is entirely by the polis project. Suchitra used her lawyerly tactics to manipulate he raudience. I am disgusted even to this day when I read the salacious reporting of this incident: “I feel extremely disrespected by what he has done. The original intent to share my story in a way to uplift my community was the only reason I agreed to work with him. I thought he was genuinely using his craft to do good for members of the African Diaspora. To know that he has been profiting from this act of violence angers me.” I’m sorry she feels this way. I have had a chat with ‘Alexis Ward’ (who has now reverted to Mufasa Bastet on social media) and put across my point of view. I leave it to her to reconsider her position.
Trust, said the psychotherapist-essayist Adam Phillips, is risk masquerading as a promise. All consensual nude photography is performative in nature. What is it really like for the sitter? Why do they agree to do it? And how does one bridge the obvious power gap in this collaboration? As a(n Indian) (male) (cishet) photographer, I cannot help but confront these perplexing questions. Another woman who found herself in front of my camera under similar circumstances ten years ago had her story to share. I could never have imagined this deeply personal articulation of our shared moment.
The Khoj exhibition was crowded to the point of suffocation. I got the impression that my work was well-received. Two portraits in particular stood out and generated many queries. Mufasa’s and the one of Helen (see below). The artist Vivan Sundaram was at the show. He had many questions for me about my process and some good words for this approach. He encouraged me to apply for the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation grant dedicated to ‘staged and constructed photography’. Of course, I applied. Here is a comment offered by the jury chaired by Florian Ebner, chief of photography, Centre Pompidou:
“His body of work consists of staged portraits of African people living in the neighbourhoods [across India]. Mahesh’s work convinced us in many ways. He photographed members of this community during the night transforming the nocturnal settings into a real stage proudly occupied by his protagonists. Despite the formal quality of his arrangements and the depth of his images, the photographer is still quite close to his protagonists and proved an honest empathy to the people.” – Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography 2017
It appears the only time my work failed to convey an “honest empathy to the people” was in Suchitra’s biased and vitriolic assessment of it.
6. Critical Readings, Passing on Learnings
Whose story is it anyway?
In the history of photography studies, the Story of the Unnamed Woman has fed into critical readings of representation, power, and gaze in photo documentary. It has also become a familiar trope in popular journalism used to rue the decline of ethics in photography. Who doesn’t love a shock story where the photographer’s narrative and that of the subject is revealed to be widely discordant?
Thirty-two years after the ‘Afghan Girl’ first appeared on the cover of the National Geographic, she said in a BBC interview, “The photo created more problems than benefits. It made me famous, but also led to my imprisonment.” What do we infer from this? How much of a difference would consent have made? Should the photographer never have taken the picture in the first place? Or is her imprisonment a timely critique of the human rights situation that prevails in her country? In polis project speak, “Sometimes being empathetic about someone’s experiences might mean not turning them into a story. Not every story needs to be narrated. There is no burden on anyone to narrate their trauma for us.” I beg to differ. Journalists, activists, and artists should find evermore creative ways and effective means to capture and disseminate the stories that matter. [Read: The Afghan Girl: A Life Revealed]
As for ‘Migrant Mother’, that other iconic portrait of the 20th century, the Los Angeles Times caught up with her in 1978. What she had to say was again disheartening: “I can’t get a penny out of it… I wish she hadn’t taken my picture.” In her lifetime, she had been The Woman Fighting Mad Over Famous Depression Photo. [Read: No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy] But when she died, her son said, “None of us ever really understood how deeply Mama’s photo affected people… I guess we had only looked at it from our perspective. For Mama and us, the photo had always been a bit of a curse.”
To paraphrase Robert Evans, that great storyteller, there are three stories to every portrait: the photographer’s, the subject’s, and the one that singes itself to the public’s imagination. And none of them is untrue. This debate about representational accuracy is so last-century, but we must still continue to have it. I wish I could be completely free of the burden of ‘telling’ others’ ‘stories’ in words. In fact, others enable me to tell my story. My story–the only one I have the right to tell.
Who counts in society?
Art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, underscoring ‘the unique corrective power of photography and its ability to shape a new vision of the constitution.’ wrote in Aperture magazine's Vision & Justice issue: “Being an engaged citizen requires grappling with pictures, and knowing their historical context with, at times, near art-historical precision. Yet it is the artist who knows what images need to be seen to affect change and alter history, to shine a spotlight in ways that will result in sustained attention.” We must start thinking differently about images for justice. What is so conceptual about racism (and hunger and poverty), asks Suchitra. Not for the one immersed in these realities but for the one far removed from it, the conceptual arts can take them to the experience and move them into action.
How do you explain to a child racism, injustice, and the infinite capacity of humans to perpetrate evil against one another? I know a 12-year old who was once moved by an image he came across in an encyclopedia, the very sight of which would have a lifelong impact on him. It was a diagram that described in graphic detail the construction of a ship that made transatlantic journeys during the African slave trade. That image was ‘Description of a Slave Ship’. I was that 12-year old. I did not know back then what I know now: the very image that conjured in my mind the horror of the slave trade was also responsible, upon its publication in 1789, for ushering in the anti-slavery movement in England and the United States.
Almost a century later, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass would go on to make his historic speech, Pictures and Progress: “Progress requires pictures because of the images they conjure in one’s imagination.” Almost two centuries later, photography has vastly grown in its richness. To use it merely as proof or evidence that someone or something existed is tantamount to criminal underutilisation of a medium that has immense imagination-conjuring potential.
Culture wars
The polis project makes wild comparisons and draws from lazy references. After a one-page scan of my work on a blog, we are presented with a tangential reference to Kobena Mercer’s reading of ‘racial fetishism’ in the work of Robert Mapplethorpe. Mercer, a Clark Prize-winning art writer, wrote in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, about Mapplethorpe’s methodical, form-focussed nudes of black men, “We are not invited to imagine what their lives, histories or experiences are like, as they are silenced as subjects in their own right, and in a sense, sacrificed on the pedestal of an aesthetic ideal in order to affirm the omnipotence of the master subject, whose gaze has the power of light and death.” Sure, that sounds like the same Mapplethorpe who posthumously was at the centre of an epoch-defining controversy that reduced a lifetime of his work to basically five images. The American right-wing tried to shut down the show and took the museum director to court. (Read When Art Fought the Law and the Art Won)
With Mapplethorpe’s comeback as a year-long Guggenheim retrospective in New York, the arts and culture journalist Charlotte Jansen reflects in the British Journal of Photography (February 2019): “Mapplethorpe’s influence, not only on the LGBTQI community, but on artists interested in the relationship between the camera, the gaze, sexuality and the self, continues at a time that politically mirrors the US culture wars of 1988, where censorship has become more insidious. The question that hangs over the contemporary audience is to what extent we are now conditioned to self-censor — something that is harder to perceive and dismantle.” Increasingly, the ‘Shut Up and Shut Down!’ tactics of the far-right and the far-left seem indistinguishable from each other. Suchitra and her (moral) polis project end their discourse with a call for “tearing down” the culture that enables work like mine to exist.
7. Media and the Image
All this talk of Mercer and Mapplethorpe pales into embarrassing irrelevance in an India where black people are still casually referred to as habshi—a pejorative that has carried over generations since the Mughals took Abyssinians as slaves. Contrasting realities play out in 21st century India. At a glance, the towns on the periphery of the National Capital Region are ‘modern’ with their wide roads and towering high-rises. But on the ground, prejudices are primitive. In March 2017, a spate of violence targetting African students broke out in the satellite town of Greater Noida. Once again, the relationship between Indian and African communities plummeted to a new low.
One bizarre incident that revealed the racist underbelly of this society was when an Indian boy went missing from his home in a Greater Noida gated community. The best possible explanation, some thought, was that he was cannibalised by Nigerians in the neighbourhood. (Read: Nigerian Students In Greater Noida Accused Of Cannibalism, Neighbours Barge In To Search Refrigerator) The missing boy came back the next morning (and later died at home) but an FIR was filed against the Nigerians anyway. They went into hiding. A couple of months later, I met the boys and heard them out. I believed their story could be a valuable addition to my photobook on racism in India.
Charles Kennedy, vice president of the Nigerian Citizens Welfare Association, who to this day maintains that he is the official guardian of these boys, permitted access after interviewing me over two days. He understood the concept I was trying to achieve and the significance of why this image needed to be made with these boys. The feature story editor of (the now defunct) India Photo Project was with me on both days to shoot a video of my process for their instagram blog. We agreed not to use this photo on social media for the time being. I was especially sensitive to not reveal the whereabouts of the boys as was done by mainstream media.
The filmmaker Wenceslaus ‘Wency’ Mendes (quoted in the article) found the fridge image to be “visually shocking, unethical, and endangered the lives of the boys.” I do not share his alarmist view. The image was shown for the first and last time (until now) in a one-night-only slideshow at the opening of the Delhi exhibition which emphasised that images of violence do not need to look like violence itself. Indian media has earned an unfortunate reputation of often being driven by base motives in deciding what news to cover and amplify. More gruesome the visuals, the better its value, they seem to believe.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, the Goldsmiths anthropology lecturer quoted in the article, correctly recalls that in 2014, Africans living in India became a hot story. By 2017, however, the media were open to considering new story angles. I was able to introduce them to more voices, especially that of African women, who then spoke for themselves. Once, Al Jazeera invited me to their studios in Washington, DC for a panel discussion on the condition of Africans in India. I assume my experience of working closely with the African community made me a suitable candidate to talk about their plight. During the show, there came a moment when it became apparent why these programs serve a purpose. The infamous Tarun Vijay episode got swiftly picked up by the media at home. It served the very fruitful purpose of laying bare India’s internal racism to an international audience.
The record shows The African Portraits successfully straddled the terrains of art, activism, and journalism. It respectfully engaged with the African diaspora to shine light on racism and discrimination in India where these conversations have been notoriously difficult to have. What to do when our white supremacists are brown; our Black people are also brown; and we are colonisers amongst ourselves?
8. Why Exhibit?
In June 2017, The African Portraits travelled to the fifth and final stop on its India tour: Exhibit320 in New Delhi. Coming close on the heels of the violence against Africans in Greater Noida, the exhibition was a much-anticipated event with some journalistic urgency to it. What kind of audience could we expect at the gallery? Pallavi Rao (quoted in the article) of Indiana University imagines: “…in the rarefied upper-caste and upper-class spaces in New Delhi where these photographs have been displayed, the pleasurable consumption of othered black bodies is no less hungry than the consumptive white gaze.” Kuch bhi.
In actuality, the turnout on the opening night was an almost perfectly balanced audience of Indians and Africans: diplomats, students, artists, photographers, journalists, professors, an actor, a struggling filmmaker, four potbellied gatecrashers and a Bengali poet. It was a magical evening. As many portraits came to life, many visitors were curious to strike up conversations with them and even took the opportunity to offer their apologies on behalf of the nation-at-large. They expressed their support, exchanged contacts, there was a bit of right-swiping too. What a remarkable change from the vitiated atmosphere that persisted for weeks in the National Capital. (Nobody from Khoj showed up, although invited.)
So, why exhibit? With all the media coverage that The African Portraits was getting, why bother showing this work in the limiting confines of a gallery space? The polis project did the predictable thing by constructing a capitalist strawman. “Did you know he was selling your photos?!?” is an ignorant characterisation of the possibilities to the exhibition series. What if I was only selling the shadow to support the substance?
Why Exhibit? was the title of an edited book published by Amsterdam-based FW:Books in late 2018. This 368-page tome ‘aims to provide a foundation for a wider discourse about exhibiting photographies in the 21st century.’ The African Portraits was the only exhibition from India to feature in the book. The photo editor and curator Tanvi Mishra wrote of the Exhibit320 vernissage: “The public experience in Shantaram’s work blurred the distinction between the subject and the viewer, and became a site of possibility—of simultaneous acceptance and resistance…
“While the images were made as a response to the fear experienced by the community, the display of these images in a physical space […] generated an atmosphere wherein it appeared that those present had acquired some agency… the act of positioning these images in a gallery validated the presence of these minority communities (and perhaps even afforded them respect) in a country which they frequently come up against ridicule and even the threat of violence when interacting with the mainstream population.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
An air of bonhomie prevailed that night in Delhi, in direct contrast to Suchitra’s exaggerated, bogus claim that “everyone was angry and upset [about the fridge and the nude images].” After the show, Samuel Abiye Jack (a Nigerian student of Ambedkar University and the then president of the Association of African Students in India-AASI) did bring his personal objections to my notice. Another person (quoted in the article but left unnamed) is Precious Amalawa, a survivor of one of the worst attacks against Africans in India. He definitely had some moments of camaraderie at the show. Worrying about the nude image was not the highlight of his evening. Samuel and Precious are both articulate individuals capable of holding forth on TV debates. When I explained to them the point of why I made those images, they got it and were able to appreciate the intent validated by their own experiences in India.
The evening at Exhibit320 was a memorable event that brought people together. Any time that happens, it’s better than the prevailing socio-political climate. Throughout its nationwide exhibition tour, The African Portraits gave the public ways to interact with the work, the means to interact with the topic, and the space to interact with the subjects.
Queries? Comments? Suggestions on what adjective best fits the blank in this essay’s title? Contact Mahesh Shantaram at ms@thecontrarian.in