Where Three Dream Cross

I caught Where Three Dreams Cross, a show of 150 years of sub-continental photography, in Winterthur, Switzerland, where it has traveled after opening at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. The curatorial argument is that this is India / Pakistan / Bangladesh as seen by locals rather than westerners, and therefore, implicitly, a more authentic portrait of the place.

I find the argument patently false. There’s a picture, for instance, of three poor women standing on an incline, taken by an Indian or Bangladeshi (I failed to make notes, will annotate the post after I get back to Bombay) in 2003 which could easily have been captured by an Orientalist Brit in 1903. Conversely, Henri Cartier-Bresson, for all the baneful influence he had on future generations of Indian photogs, crafted revelatory images of India.

The most obvious difference between Indian and European uses of photography is found in the painted photographs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The decorative aesthetic of the subcontinent is on full view here, but to say that is to step into Orientalist clichés.

The trick, then, is to avoid statement, because any statement is a trap. The Indian photographer who did this best was Raghubir Singh. He used every cliché about India -- crowds, colours, ambassador cars, monsoon rains -- but his images evade all stereotypes. Part of the reason why he manages this is the way he deploys figures across the frame, so there isn’t one centre that can harden into statement or symbol. India has interesting intrinsic qualities that are also crucial to the imperialist discourse of difference / otherness / exoticism critiqued by post-colonial theory. The subject matter from which both are extracted is identical. It doesn’t matter if the photographer is Indian or European, as soon as his or her images become statements, they can be interpreted as ‘problematic’ arguments about the subcontinent. Raghubir Singh managed consistently to produce pictures that are fascinating artifacts without being manifest propositions.

The fact that his work (he's represented in the show by four or five images), while invariably well regarded, has been virtually ignored by post-colonial theorists indicates to me that these theorists don’t really desire what the curators of Three Dreams Cross want to highlight, namely a different way of seeing, so much as an opposed way of seeing, though such an approach is doomed to fall into the same pattern of clichés as that which it contests.

I have got a bit side-tracked from Three Dreams Cross, and might say more about the show itself later. What disappointed me most was that I’d seen pretty much every image in the past five years. The show is arranged thematically rather than chronologically of geographically, which was a wise decision. The themes are: Portrait, Performance, Family, Body Politic and Street. In Winterthur, the first three of these are contained in the museum’s main building. They’re probably the most interesting bits for Europeans, but I found these sections tedious. The show picked up in the annex, where The Body Politic and The Street reside.

A quibble about the title, derived from Eliot’s Ash Wednesday: the dreams of the three nations are never shown to cross during the course of the show. There’s good reason for that, of course, because when the dreams have crossed it hasn’t been in a convivial fashion, and the last thing the curators want is to focus on political conflict (that would be giving in to western media perception). If the dreams have been prevented from crossing, though, why put anything about intersections in the title?

Bhopal memorials

Of the hundreds of images produced in the days after the Bhopal gas leak, two stand out in the public memory. Strangely, both document the same scene: the burial of a girl who died from inhaling the gas, her eyes turned glassy blue, the smallness of her face accentuated by a man's hand bestowing a final loving caress. Raghu Rai's black and white photograph was taken from a high angle at one end of the makeshift grave.



At almost the same instant, Pablo Bartholomew, crouching close to the child's head to one side of the burial spot, clicked a colour frame which went on to win the World Press Photo of the Year award.


The pictures demonstrate the different perspectives of their creators: Rai, a lover of classical compositions, drew out the pathos of the event, while the edgier Bartholomew highlighted its horror. The two photographs are often confused, not just because they are similar, but because, I believe, the intimacy of the scene creates the impression of a solitary communion between father and daughter, a moment which the photographer witnessed and memorialised without intruding in any way. One lensman might achieve such a non-instrusive presence, it is difficult to imagine two doing so.
Other pictures taken by the dozens of cameramen at the spot attest to the frenzy in places where burials or cremations were taking place. If somebody had filmed a long shot of the yard while the girl was being buried, we'd have seen, not just a father and two lensmen at an infant's graveside, but a dozen other burials not far away.
None of this indicates that the intimacy evident in Rai's shot, and to a lesser extent in Bartholomew's, is fake. Rai, describing the genesis of the shot, said he followed vehicles taking the dead for final rites, and came upon the spot where, after burying his child, a man brushed away the dirt on her face, uncovering it for a final look. Both photographers, in this account, wept afterwards.
But what if it had been otherwise? What if the man doing the burying was a stranger to the child whose body, like those of hundreds of victims, had languished unclaimed, possibly because her entire family had perished? Nobody has come forward in the twenty-five years since the disaster to provide a name and a narrative to go with the image. What if the two photographers, recognising the potential of a dramatic shot, asked the man to repeat his gesture till they found the ideal frame? That kind of thing happens regularly.
At what point would the artificiality of the process of creation begin to impede the meaning of these photographs, which derive their significance from being representations of fact? At one extreme we have the photographer as the equivalent of a fly on the wall, in no way interfering with an unfolding event. At the other end we have an entirely staged act being passed off as something real.
The most famous photograph taken by the legendary photojournalist Robert Capa, showing a loyalist soldier in the Spanish civil war falling to the ground after being hit by a bullet, seems to capture a fleeting moment without intervention.


In recent years, critical consensus has moved toward the idea that Capa staged the entire scene. If this were proven true beyond doubt, one of the most famous journalistic photographs of all time would be sapped of most of its import.
That would not be the case with the Rai - Bartholomew's pictures because the two certainly did not stage the gas leak, nor the child's death. The hand in the frame, while adding an important sense of proportion and, in the case of Rai, emotion, is nevertheless not central to the image. That role belongs to the startling face of the child, which death transformed into something like a ghastly doll, and which became representative of the thousands of painful, unnecessary deaths in Bhopal twenty-five years ago.
While the meaning of their images is secure, I find it peculiar that the two brilliant photographers have not spoken at greater length about their most recognisable (and, paradoxically, most misattributed) creations. It now appears we will never know the story of the infant, but we might yet understand more fully how she came to be the emblem of a terrible tragedy.