Five Photographers From India

Posted on Leave a comment on Five Photographers From India

The photography most associated with the subcontinent often ties into simplistic ideas of what the lives of over a billion people entail. Situated at different points on the axes of socio-economic, cultural, and geographic status, the work of the following five photographers show a sliver of personalities and experiences from across South Asia that push the boundaries of what we’ve come to accept as the general reality of people outside cities. I thought I’d share some of their work here.

Deepti Asthana

Asthana, a self-trained artist, is interested in photographing women in large, open frames that show moments of quiet freedom for her subjects. She features a diversity of women from various parts of the country, concerned only with showing them as they are. There is no glamorisation or implied pathos.The photographs capture split seconds and admit to being one still in a life of infinite variation. In Tamil Nadu, a woman in a light pink sari is shown speaking happily on a mobile phone. A woman from a nomadic community in Ladakh is seen standing with one hand on a local goat. Asthana’s sensitive, honest photographs can be seen here.

Arati Kumar-Rao

Kumar-Rao’ photographs are unique for their commitment to telling little-known stories about India’s rapidly changing ecology. Through reportage and photographs, she has documented the “slow violence” of environmental degradation. One of her reports exposed the compelling story of how people along the banks of the Ganga lose their land to river erosion, but aren’t offered relief funds by the government because erosion isn’t classified as a disaster the way earthquakes and floods are. She’s capturedthe practice of river piracy in Bangladesh where the boats of poor fishermen are stolen and held for ransom. Her work in this field won her the inauguralAnupam Mishra Memorial Medal for excellence in river journalism in 2017. One can view her environmental and nature photographyhere.

Navtej Singh

While Kumar-Rao’s photographs focus on the darker stories in the South Asian landscape, Singh’s work is a highlight reel of India’s remaining beauty. He has the ability to make even a langoor appear majestic against the walls of Orchha Fort in Madhya Pradesh, and to transform a busy, crowded fish auction in Mumbai into an arresting sight that reveals an order within the chaos. The photographs choose versatile subjects such as doors, parrots, bearded and turbaned smokers, the faces of older women in rustic India, the packed bicycles and carts on the roads, and much else. His more polished photographs can be viewed here, and the more informal shots he posts to social media can be seen here.

Prabuddha Dasgupta

His signature black and white style was raw with the intent that every photograph be striking rather than beautiful or comforting. When thumbing through his photographs, one gets the feeling that in his world it was always afternoon in a quiet house. One of his series, Edge of Faith, is a hazy story of Goa’s relationship with Christianity that moves through the intimate spaces of homes to the chapels and the automobiles rusting from the rains. Another is called Longings and is a lonely montage that shows people at their most vulnerable and at their most introspective. His photographs have been collected in books by Viking and Seagull, and some of them can be viewed here.

Shibu Arakkal

Arakkal is the monarch of photo series. Within a particular series, his photographs mirror and contradict one another to create a visual experience difficult to pin down in words. He manipulates photographs with edits that are subtle and masterful in the way they accentuate the story of the photograph – for example, his Constructing Life series features aged skin with edits that weave cracks into the photograph. One of his most stunning works is a series called Four that maps his emotional journey through four decades of his life. It’s narrated through narrow landscape photographs and dreamy triptychs. His work, varied and expansive, can be explored here.

Manhattan Beach

Posted on Leave a comment on Manhattan Beach

Reading Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach

 

On the southern tip of Brooklyn is a neighbourhood by the sea popular in summertime for picnics on the beach and warm swims. In winter, it is simply a residential area where families scraped a living in the years during and after the Depression leading into the Second World War.

Jennifer Egan names her latest novel after the place her characters call home –Manhattan Beach.The Kerrigans are an Irish family whose luck peaks before the crash, and who must renegotiate life like millions of other Americans at the time. Their patriarch, Ed Kerrigan, hesitates every day before he re-enters the apartment where his family lives. Their circumstances are far from what he had envisioned for them once.

 

He’s devoted to his wife, Agnes, and his elder daughter, Anna. But his relationship with his youngest, Linda, is strained by her inability to walk, communicate or care for herself in any way. Agnes and Anna are devoted to Linda in a way that Ed isn’t able to muster. Self-aware of his revulsion towards his disabled daughter, he resolves to buy an expensive chair that will afford her new kinds of mobility and access to the world outside their apartment. He strikes a deal, witnessed by Anna, with a mobster called Dexter Styles. Shortly after, he disappears without explanation or trace.

 

Manhattan Beach is a fascinating portrait of the time, of the ways in which men banded in the Depression to make money in any way they could, and of the way possibilities for women opened up in the Second World War when the men were away fighting in the war (a theme visited in last year’s film, The Finest Hour, which you should watch if you haven’t already!). Anna grows up to work at the Naval Yard inspecting and measuring parts of military ships. Out with a colleague one night, she accidentally bumps into Dexter Styles at one of the nightclubs he owns. Without disclosing that she is Ed Kerrigan’s daughter, she allows herself to grow closer to him. Their relationship is one of the most compelling parts of the narrative. Anna herself isn’t sure whether she is drawn to him or whether she is simply trying to uncover how and why her father disappeared.  It is a story of intertwined fates and all the characters have secrets. But it is principally a story about New York—a different kind of New York. We get a sense of this from Melville’s quote at the beginning of the book:

 

Yes, as everyone knows,

                        Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

 

The memorable parts of Manhattan Beach are the scenes that  paint the sea as “an electric mix of attarction and dread”, and “an infinite hypnotic expanse”. For Dexter the sea is never the same on any two days. So combined with the social  realism, there is the mystical presence of images of water– as powerful as the city’s tenements, subways and skyscarpers.

 

The novel does reveal the tenor of the times such as when Anna competes for a job as a diver who repairs war ships or when Agnes and Anna visit an expensive doctor who cannot cure Linda but who does allow them to feel temporarily better. However,what’s frustrating about the novel is that it pushes Dexter and Anna towards decisions that don’t correspond to what we know of their characters. Egan also imports two starkly different worlds – the Kerrigan women and the criminal network – without sufficiently patching them together. Anna’s family and her relationship with Dexter engaged me far more deeply than the sections on Dexter’s or Ed’s lives.

 

Finally, a more traditional novel than A Visit from the Goon Squad,Manhattan Beach was an enjoyable but uneven reading experience for me