On Photography: Truth, Lies, and Photos

(This is a follow-on to part one of my notes on photography)

 

Many urban middleclass Indians I know are peeved by what they see as a staple of photography on India: squalor, poverty, lepers, fakirs, the deformed. Their India is not like that, and they harbor a knee-jerk hostility to such images. There are so many more suitable subjects of photography, they say, this isn’t the full story (what is?). One cousin was more articulate: the West, he said, has employed such a lens for decades to perpetuate negative stereotypes of India. It is an act of power. The white man came, and still comes, with little love in his heart. His jaundiced eye only sees the exotic and the grimy, making India seem primitive and medieval.

 

This may well be true but my cousin's stance also reveals his inferiority complex. It is conditioned by what he imagines as the colonizer’s gaze, scarcely a better tribute to it. His insecure pride is tinged with nationalism. He despises a whole class of portrayals of his country, including scenes so ubiquitous that they can perhaps be ignored only as a survival tactic. Because he turns defensive and shuts off upfront, he doesn't find in such images a universal human drama beyond nations and states. He neither sees in them our common humanity, nor its astonishing diversity.

 

I present this example to suggest that the motivations we ascribe to a photographer usually have more to do with us than with the photographer. To be sure, fresh new pictures can challenge stereotypes, forcing us to examine our received ideas. They can be a mirror to our inner selves; they can reflect the very depth of our being and experience, individual and collective. They can certainly evoke in us joy and sorrow, wonder and delight, but can a picture by itself increase self-knowledge? One answer is that it helps only those who are ready to be helped by it. It may well confound others, or reinforce their stereotypes. Like all works of art, a picture's contribution to self-knowledge is therefore indeterminate.

 

It is often said that a photo doesn't lie, since it records something real in the world. But what's behind this laboring woman’s smile for the camera? Is it even a smile or is she reacting to the load?  A smile absolves us from further concern or involvement. It lulls us into imagining that all is well in her life, despite her innocence of dentists and sturdier equipment. Our ignorance and our need for solace can even make her charming. Is the deformed man begging for alms, yawning, or singing? There are many other interpretations but they all share one thing: what we make of them has little to do with their self-image or reality, a lot with ours. So photos can lie, and generally because we let them.

Comments

[Teal]

Thoughtful comments.
Good questions.

It is interesting to see the weight of meaning placed on the reciever. Not just in the context of their own interpretations, but also the context of how they choose to respond to input. Is it something that passively reinforces some expectation? Or is input a chance to ask questions, new or old?

[MojaveMike]

I know this isn't the subject of the post, but in the interest of citing an actual example of one's perceptions I present my reaction to the second photo.

(If you're reading this and are interested in comparing your experience to mine, don't read the rest of this comment until you've looked at the photo and recall what your initial and final reactions are....)

-MojaveMike
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For what it's worth, I'm a person raised in the USA, and my immediate response was that this lady is smiling because of the photographer. The emotions are - a friendly acknowledgement of his presence, her amusement with what the phtographer sees as interesting enought to photograph, and her slightly self-concious, slightly-blushing, coquettishness (modesty and coyness that is quite candid).