A different view of the past: How photo archives are bringing hidden stories to life
Curators are dipping into photo archives to tell fresh stories on subjects as diverse as colonial history and industrialisation
How does a photograph capture the spirit of the city, its citizens and the revolutionary spirit prevalent at the time? It’s an idea that informs a forthcoming exhibition, Disobedient Subjects Bombay (1930-31). Here, Bombay of old essays the role of a protagonist—its architecture and landmarks serving as sites for protest. The show, which draws from an archival album, Collections of Photographs of Old Congress Party—K.L. Nursey, presents a multi-layered narrative. For one, it harks back to a significant chapter in India’s freedom struggle, the civil disobedience movement, which is often centred around the figure of Mohandas K Gandhi in popular culture.
“We associate the Civil Disobedience Movement quintessentially with Gandhi, but the album appears to be making a different argument: that the people of Bombay made the movement that in turn made Gandhi globally famous," the curators, Sumathi Ramaswamy and Avrati Bhatnagar, state over email. When the two, both faculty members at Duke University in the US, started working formally on the Nursey album—part of the private archive Alkazi Collection of Photography (ACP) in Delhi—about five years ago, they became interested in the place of the camera in the visual culture that emerged around Gandhi.
The show, set to open in Mumbai on 12 October, is presented by the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. Besides the widely known historical events, the exhibition foregrounds the role of ordinary people in expressing dissent against colonial rule, and “turning the streets of Bombay into sites of nationalist assertion, as captured on camera". They also examine, through photos, the role of women, mobilised by the Desh Sevika Sangh, a women's volunteer organisation, founded by Sarojini Naidu in April 1930. The show is accompanied by a book, Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay, 1930-1931, published by the ACP in association with Mapin Publishing.
Disobedient Subjects adds to the ongoing discourse around the photo archive as a pulsating entity, rather than a static repository of images. In fact, the archive has now become a starting point of inquiry into a myriad of subjects. The scope has also expanded to include archives of family and everyday images.
In such a scenario, the role of the curator and the archivist in “reintroducing the archive to the public" has also become important. “Who accesses the archives and then interprets them? How inclusive are they in their approach? All of this plays a key role," says Aditya Arya, who helms the India Photo Archive Foundation, which runs the Museo Camera—a contemporary venue documenting the history of photography—in Gurugram. One of the most prominent archives, among many others, that Arya restored and catalogued belonged to the photojournalist Kulwant Roy (1914-1984), whose work covered the last years of colonial rule and the early decades of India’s independence.
As a historian and archivist, Arya likes to go beyond the physical image to question the technology and process by which a certain photograph was made. Digging out stories buried in the visual material requires time, patience and understanding of a particular body of work and the period when it was made. Take, for instance, industrial photographs taken around in the 1990s by several photographers. “Who was allowed into this realm and why?" he asks. "Where do you draw the line between documentary and advertising?"
Arya recently came across an archive of a photographer, who was on the ground in Delhi during the 1984 riots. He calls it a “gruesome archive", a visual testimony to the violence of the times. “I am trying to understand why he shot a particular angle, what was influencing his vision."
Of presence and absence
What finds a place in visual culture, and what doesn’t? Do images enable myth making? These are critical questions that researchers and curators are trying to answer by looking into the archive.
Ramaswamy first came across the Nursey album while working on another major project in the US on Gandhi and visual culture specifically about the manner in which artists of India had helped create the iconic image we now have of him. Bhatnagar then visited the Alkazi Foundation’s office in New Delhi to look at this collection of photographs. She was struck by the way the Nursey album captured a rare side of a well-known historical event, bringing into view details she had not seen in existing scholarship. This paradox stayed with her. They started working on the album in summer 2020 at the height of the covid-19 pandemic. The project was first conceived as a digital exhibit, which over time has materialized into the exhibit that will be launched at the CSMVS.
“What’s fascinating about this archive is how it reveals a moment when documentary photography in India was still finding its visual language," they write. “Photographers carried the formal, carefully composed style of the studio into the public sphere, into streets, markets, and political gatherings, so even images meant to record ‘facts’ were aesthetically shaped and intentional."
Past links to present
In Delhi’s Mahatta Studios, the family has been working to restore and catalogue the vast repository of photos, dating back to 1915. Madan Mahatta, who was born in Srinagar and joined his family’s photo studio in 1954 in Delhi, worked across portraiture, dance, theatre as well as industrial and architectural photography. In fact, his photos of the Hall of Nations (1972), Shri Ram Centre (1968), Palika Centre (1983) etched a portrait of Nehruvian modernism in Delhi, while documenting the work of architects such as Raj Rewal, Habib Rahman, Shiv Nath Prasad and Kuldip Singh. These photos have now become vital documentation, given the demolition of some key buildings of the time. An exhibition of Mahatta’s architectural photographs, titled Delhi Modern, was organised for the first time in 2012 at PHOTOINK, Delhi, and curated by Ram Rahman.
His industrial images, which are just as revelatory of the economic and social transformation at the time—the rise of the middle class, changing gender norms—, have also been showcased far and wide. “These images, which document factories that came up around 1991, offer a lot of nuance now. You see a lot of male-driven professions being photographed before 1991, and there is a gradual change with women making their presence felt in the factories," says Arjun Mahatta, the photographer’s grandson, who has been actively preserving his family legacy. With a team of 15 people, he is studying the vast repository for threads and connections. “Thankfully, my grandfather was an extremely organised person. Every wallet has details of when it was shot and how."
Arjun is linking the past with the present in his own way through the book, Maha Kumbh: A Spiritual Odyssey, dedicated to his grandfather. The book, all set to be launched in New York next month at the Indo-American Literature Festival, juxtaposes images taken by Madan Mahatta of the Kumbh Mela in the 1980s with those taken this year by Arjun, his father and uncle.
Equally significant is Ahmed Ali archive, exhibited over the past few years by PHOTOINK, both for the persona of the photographer and the depth of the industrial landscape that he covered. Born in 1923, he started work at Bourne & Shepherds, Calcutta, at the age of 17, finally setting up a studio called Universal Camera Arts in 1948. “After World War II, the demand for photography in sales, promotion and advertising went up and Ahmed Ali found his services increasingly called for, and he began to photograph a wide variety of subjects. His first professional assignment was to photograph the Tata Steel Plant in 1947," states the note on the PHOTOINK website. Since then, he covered tea gardens, mines, steel plants, automotive factories, and more. Today, his body of work is of interest to those studying both advertising and industrial photography in India.
Expanding the scope
The photo archive has also led to interdisciplinary responses—over time theatre directors, performance artists, poets and art collectives have responded to it.
During the 2019 edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale, curated by Pushpamala N. Mumbai-based artist collective, CAMP, entered into a visual conversation with the photo archives of The Hindu in the work, A Photogenetic Line. This featured a 100-feet-long branching sequence of cutouts as a way of “reframing and rebirthing existing photographs as new organisms. Not to remove their background environments, nor to frame heroic figures, but to create a new boundary or border for the image... a border that leads us to the next image."
The discovery of newer kinds of archives has expanded the scope of study and curation. The recently-concluded edition of the Chennai Photo Biennale features an archive of Lalit Mohan Sen (1898-1954). Presented by Emami Art, this set of images showcased the diverse oeuvre, spanning portraiture, landscape and ethnography, by this artist, who was not just a celebrated painter and printmaker but also a photographer. His photos were showcased with his paintings, linocut illustrations and other archival material to offer a view of how the different artistic practices influenced one another.
“This year, we also discovered a photo archive of Tamil cinema sets belonging to T. Lakshmikanthan, who had shot these images over five decades," says Varun Gupta, director, Chennai Photo Biennale. He got to know about the archive through friend and movie producer Suresh Balaji—Lakshmikanthan had been the set photographer for nearly all the films produced by the family, besides working across Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu and Kannada films. “These images were exhibited in a park in the show, Maasaru Kaatchiyavaruku, with lakhs of people stopping by. Of course, the images featured some of the leading film stars, but we tried to find ways of looking at these photos beyond the superficial view by linking them with lines from Tamil poetry," he adds.
The curator, Nirmal Rajagopalan—a huge Tamil cinema enthusiast—came up with this idea of combining the lines from the Thirukkural, authored by poet-philosopher Thiruvalluvar with the images, “the lyrical nature of the photographs complementing the verbal brevity of the couplet".
In his view, there are hundreds and thousands of archives waiting to be discovered. “When they reveal themselves, they become part of the folklore of photography. Take the Homi Vyarawalla archive, which has taken on a legendary status," he adds. Or the Twin Sisters Archive, featuring photos by sisters Debalina Mazumder and Manobina Roy. Recently on view at the Dilip Piramal Art Gallery, Mumbai, these images showed their joint experiments with light in the 1930s in Ramnagar, and portraits of family and friends taken in Calcutta, Bombay and Europe.
“Then there is the body of work by photojournalist T.M. Satyan (1923-2009), which is just sitting there and has been exposed as much as it should have been. There are hidden archives in cinema, which would be very popular if they emerged. Holiday imagery—casual images of family, what they wore, how they travelled—have been neglected as they are seen as less valuable," states Gupta.
Archives remain alive due to the way people respond to them, including those who own them. Arya, who helps restore and digitise family archives, is often approached with requests to not show certain people in the repository due to lingering family feuds. One family requested for their trunk of images to be sent back as a distant relative threatened to sue them over certain details. “Having said that, I help a lot of people put together stories of their families. We have an interesting archive of Dev Shumsher Rana and his family, who ruled Nepal for 199 days and was then exiled to Mussoorie. We showcased this as part of Nirvasanama: Portraits of a Life in Exile through Changing Viewfinders, in 2018," he adds.
Gupta too welcomes requests to help families preserve their archives as part of Chennai Photo Biennale’s scope of work. “A lot of people keep putting off looking at their archives as they worry about the money and time to be spent on digitisation. Many of them reach out to us after their negatives are too far gone. I would urge them to give it a thought. You never know in what context your archive of photos becomes important—not just for the family but for the field of art," he says.
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