Moulting Skin, Growing Hands

Photography is borrowing from sculpture, painting, fiction and cinema to create an expanded field. Shweta Upadhyay reports about contemporary Indian photographers and their new interventions.

- Shweta Upadhyay

Sohrab Hura. From The Coast. 2013 - 2019. Photograph courtesy of Sohrab Hura. Image courtesy of Experimenter, Kolkata.

THIS EXCERPT IS TAKEN FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHY NOW ISSUE OF ART INDIA VOLUME XXII, ISSUE III, 2018.

The photograph is moulting skin, growing hands that borrow from other sources. Many photographers, as a creative method, are turning inwards and are striving not for the real but for something ephemeral and ungraspable that is beyond the image. The chosen subjects have shifted from the streets and the outer world to the private domain.

There are several autobiographical projects exploring themes of family, illness, ancestral houses like Zishaan Akbar Latif's 95 Mani Villa and Adil Hasan's When Abba was Ill. The single photograph has lost its proclamatory, prophetic powers and need not carry the burden, intensities and potentialities of the past, present and future occurrences. More and more photographers are interspersing different media and blurring the disciplines. Their works go beyond the traditional two-dimensional prints and some of them don't even use the camera! The photograph is used as a surface, a diary or alternative methods like cyanotypes and ambrotype are used. The materiality of the photographs has become as important as the content. It's the time of assemblages, appropriations and interventions. These practitioners don't regard themselves exclusively as photographers as they also work in sculpture, video, film, installation and books. But all of them mentioned in this essay have shared a prolonged relationship with the photographic image.