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Photographic memories: From being nostalgic mementos to digital distractions, photos have travelled far

Hindustan Times | ByRehana Munir
May 18, 2019 09:36 PM IST

As we march towards 2020, with its promise of perfect vision, selfie-ready smile plastered on face, it is truer than ever that ‘today everything exists to end in a photograph’!

Heard about the vegan who never got photographed because she refused to say cheese? Now that I’ve alienated any vegans who may have stumbled here (I mock you because I admire you and loathe my choices), lettuce look a little closer at this whole photography business. In recent news, iPhone has replaced their human portrait campaign with stunning billboards featuring nature photography by Apple users. That familiar moment when one turns from the Tulip Star signal towards the laburnums that skirt the Bachchans’ new residence is where my heart swings between delight and despair at the sight of elephant herds and pelican flocks. As the creatures of the wild lose their natural habitat, their filtered images take up residence in advertising displays that peddle a rapidly vanishing paradise.

The safety of albums

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There’s something about old photographs, the calling card of nostalgia. You don’t even have to have a personal connection with the subjects of a fading black and white image to feel a certain ache. It’s a trigger that works universally and in any context. In Girls Standing on Lawns, artist Maira Kalman (together with writer Daniel Handler) makes a sad-sweet statement with a curated collection of anonymous vintage photographs taken from MoMA. I was gifted the book and wondered what it was about. Having had it for a while now, and gone through the many photos with, literally, girls standing on lawns (complemented by illustrations and poetic text), I see how the project recreates a moment in history through interchangeable characters who are at the same time unique. (Yes, runs perilously close to being pretentious, but somehow rescues itself from the edge.)

From long-preserved photographs in precious frames to these blink-and-they’re-gone images, we’ve come a long way
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Like any second or subsequent child born in the 80s or before will agree, their childhoods were not documented in the way the first child in the family’s was. I barely have two or three pictures from my own childhood; my younger sister, perhaps one. And so I’m always envious of those whose childhood memories have been preserved in family albums, preventing them from being misremembered or forgotten.

Big city, small city

The recent exhibition Shifting City at Max Mueller Bhavan in Mumbai put together the works of different photographers in a narrative tapestry. Of the lot, what stayed with me was Ritesh Uttamchandani’s street-level series, taken on his phone camera, counterpointed by the big scale city shots of photographer Pallon Daruwalla. The two sets of photographs provided not just different views of my city, but also made me think of what it means to take pictures in these different ways. To point the phone camera at a nearby subject versus taking a formally composed shot using a professional lens.

Those old arguments about digital versus film, posed versus candid, natural versus artificial light, colour corrected versus raw came rushing back to me as I observed the photographs of skyscrapers and religious gatherings, women in malls and lovers in bed. In the end, the authoritative images of the city – a god’s eye view – were not half as impactful as those untidy gully scenes, where humans were busy leading their messy lives, captured unfussily on a phone camera.

Evaporating memories

These days, I’ve been hounding my niece about her Instagram feed. I’m fascinated by the “stories” she posts that evaporate in 24 hours. She rewards my persistence with a curated tour from time to time. From long-preserved photographs in precious frames to these blink-and-they’re-gone images, we’ve come a long way in the nearly 200 years since the advent of photography. Captions too have moved on from being staid descriptions to quirky and playful narratives. And then there are those trailing hashtags, the footnotes to social media photography.

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, her collection of essays on the medium, both literary and polemical, written between 1973 and 1977. As we march towards 2020, with its promise of perfect vision, selfie-ready smile plastered on face, that statement is truer than ever. Just today I posted a new Facebook profile picture, artfully black and white, taken a few years ago by a now distant friend, and wondered what that act even meant. Vain or playful? Revealing or concealing? Then in a few minutes the picture accumulated a few likes and I moved on to other activities and distractions.

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From HT Brunch, May 19, 2019

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