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Society and the scalpel of portraiture
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Dayanita Singh's series of `Family Portraits' is as much about the Parsi community as it is about the social transformations taking place in Indian society today. PETER NAGY examines the photographer's attitude to her subjects.
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"Cyrus Oshidar with his family"... Dayanita Singh's exploration of the contemporary Parsi family.
AMONG the many accomplished photographers working in India today, Dayanita Singh certainly stands out as one of the most gifted. During the past decade she has almost completely abandoned commissioned work for newspapers and magazines (an early source of experience and income) and pursued the subjects of her own choosing, for no goal other than simply the taking of more pictures. In the process, she has closely examined a number of different subjects that are both personally meaningful to her, and which articulate a great deal about contemporary India. One of these subjects is the Indian family, in both its traditionally extended and its modernised nuclear forms, from a cross-section of the major metropolitan areas. Recently, Shireen Gandhy of Bombay's Gallery Chemould invited Dayanita to continue this series by exploring the contemporary Parsi family for an exhibition, which would complement the large survey of Parsi portraiture being mounted at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay, this season.
Dayanita's series of "Family Portraits" is an ongoing documentation of her own social milieu, begun in 1996 in reaction to being repeatedly asked to photograph the India of disasters, poverty and social injustices for foreign publications. By focussing on India's cosmopolitan and economic elites, Dayanita has opened a window onto a world rich in anxieties as well as accomplishments, pride as well as prejudice. The results have been reminiscent of two definitive photographic projects of the past century: namely, August Sander's almost scientific cataloguing of his fellow Germans in the 1920s' Weimar Republic and the recording of the demi-monde of outcasts, misfits and eccentrics befriended by Diane Arbus in America in the 1960s. The similarities between these seminal bodies of work and Dayanita's own portraits of the India of the 1990s may say more about photography's relationship to times of social and psychic transformation than it does about stylistic approaches.
It is as if Dayanita Singh is both in awe of, and terrified by, the incredible power which photography wields, more so today than ever before. This is an artist who seems to approach her tool as if it is a magic sword. Her intense awareness of the camera's abilities is registered in every detail of her pictures, in the precision of their compositions, and in the countenances of her subjects. Hers is an insidious camera, which manipulates all it investigates, while the extreme self-consciousness of the photographer eclipses any unease her subjects may feel. This is not the snapshot aesthetic pioneered by Gary Winogrand nor Cartier-Bresson's famous fleet-footed capturing of that "decisive moment". This is photography as lovingly and painstakingly belaboured as the painting of the Sistine Chapel.
"Zara"
The images seem to be smothered under oppressive layers of history, allusion, mythology and culture. The subjects are treated as entomological specimens, delicately splayed open, pinned down and frozen in the amber of their psychologies and settings. Framed within their perfectly square dimensions, Dayanita's pictures resemble nothing less than hypothetical black holes, absorbing everything in their midst with no end to their avariciousness. (On other occasions the photographer has shot architecture and landscapes devoid of human subjects, but the results are only superficially minimal, for her gaze still collects copious amounts of details, surfaces, reflections and shadows in a single frame.) Dayanita may be aggressive in her search for subjects to photograph, her attitude even predatory, but she has obviously honed her social skills so well as to seduce those in front of her camera. In most of her portraits, there is a warmth and engagement that could come only from the photographer's patience, sense of humour and genuine interest in people.
Dayanita approached this series on the Parsis of Bombay no differently from her previous attempts at portraiture, averse as she is to defining anyone by religion or ethnic community. Save for the occasional dugli, feta or gara, there is nothing in these pictures that connotes the Parsi community specifically and, for this reason, the photographs share many attributes with previous works shot in Calcutta and New Delhi. Among the most contemporary of families is that of Cyrus Oshidar, pictured slightly melting and comfortably nesting in their domestic scenario, virtually inseparable from the objects chosen to construct their private personae. Dayanita is as interested in architecture, décor, furniture and collectibles in her pictures as she is in the personalities of the people as all of the elements contribute to the success of the final portrait. Dayanita's signature compositional style, in strong evidence here, utilises a spiral which twists in on itself, leading the viewer on a meandering route through details which provides not a moment's rest. Patterns and paintings complicate a single lounging family unit made up of criss-crossing arms and legs and sharing an easy confrontation with the camera.
In the many hours it takes to shoot just one family, individuals may drift apart and are often allowed to stand alone within the series as a whole. Children and adolescents can be the most revealing of subjects, and in the case of the picture of a young girl named Zara, we see Dayanita's astute use of setting to convey both message and mood. Here, the organic patterning of sunlight, as it is filtered through trees in the background, is muffled by glass and finally masked by opaque draperies, a fitting analogy for the transformation taking place in the subject herself, her anxiety with posing alone evident in one tensely cocked finger. Zara stands between the untamed outdoors and the security of the interior, her body language reveals her confidence and dependence, both awkward and gracious at the same time. The "Family Portraits" are about the relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, grandparents and grandchildren, but also about the individual's identity apart from the family and, ultimately, the larger social structures connecting us all.
The great strength of Dayanita Singh's "Family Portraits" is that they are evidence of the profound transformations taking place in India today. The photographer treats each picture as her first, each subject as an individual, and seems genuinely surprised that when the results are strung together they produce illuminating insights into contemporary times. The startling juxtapositions and contradictions that can now be found readymade in the lives of most Indians are laid bare for all to see, confrontationally, so that this is not entertainment (as is cinema) or purely informative (as are newspapers) but Art, a rarified preserve somewhere between Craft and Philosophy. In this way, the pictures themselves exist, as do their subjects, within a synthesised continuum of past, present and future, one that is immediately accessible by ringing a doorbell on Malabar Hill.
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