V isua l Musing s
V isua l Musing s
All images of the exhibit are courtesy of the Indian Photography Festival, Hyderabad
Imagined Homeland Sharbendu De gives us an idea of the complexities involved in the documentation, representation and display of a marginalised community, in this case, the Lisu tribe in Arunachal Pradesh.
Sharbendu De
B
ack in 2011, I remember looking at the pictures I was taking, with a certain disdain. Every time I looked, I did not feel ‘at one’ with them. They seemed to have come from anyone, anywhere. I had no voice. Not yet, at least. Almost five decades ago, in the 1970s, Susan Sontag, in her seminal book titled On Photography, cautioned everyone of the corrupting influence of ‘concerned photography’. “Concerned photography (or social documentary photography) has done
at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.” She further expanded on that thought... “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them.” Four decades later, in 2009, during a lecture at the University of Westminster, David Campany, who was my professor, alerted us to the perils of mindlessly toeing the line that had long been drawn by our photographic predecessors. “The photograph can be an aid to memory, but it can also become an obstacle that blocks access to the understanding of the past. It can paralyse the personal and political ability to think beyond the image in the always fraught project of remembrance,” he said. But I had forgotten these warning bells when I began photographing rural communities and natural disasters thereafter. I continued on the same path of photojournalism and social documentary photography, without questioning my pedagogy. Desperation was on the rise. At the 2011 opening of Dileep Prakash’s What Was Home, at Photoink, I enquired to Devika Daulet Singh as to how long it takes for a photographer to establish himself. “10 years,” she said. That day, I decided to give myself 10 years to find my voice. Fortuitously, a rare window welcomed me into the academic world at the AJK Mass Communication Research Center in New Delhi—I began teaching photojournalism in Jamia Millia Islamia. The academic engagement with the students challenged me everyday (and continues to do so)—their doubts, anxieties, questions, and confrontations opened new doors of perception. So I continued reading,
Better Photography
december 2018
december 2018
teaching, and building my voice alongside my practice, while Sontag, Campany, Sekula, Burgin were there to aid me along the way. This year, in September, my six-year-long (and ongoing) project Imagined Homeland made its debut in India, at the Indian Photography Festival (IPF), Hyderabad. I had teamed up with the German artist Boris Eldagsen, who curated the work. I had met him last year during a workshop at Chobi Mela, in Dhaka. Since then, we’ve kept in touch, mostly with Boris looking at my work from time-to-time, advising, and helping me make important edits to it. Soon after, we found ourselves brainstorming over ideas on how best to represent what I had shot, for the exhibition at IPF.
Visitors are seen gazing at the Imagined Homeland exhibit, at the Indian Photography Festival, Hyderabad, which took place a few months ago.
The Thought Behind the Project Imagined Homeland is a representational project using visual, aural, and textual mediums on the life of the indigenous Lisu tribe living in the intractable forests of Namdapha National Park (NNP), on the India-Myanmar border of Arunachal Pradesh. In 1983, the Indian government converted 1985 sq km of the Lisus’ native land into the Namdapha National Park, without consulting them. They declared them as Better Photography
