#khushinansi

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #5

There is such a pleasure in reading James Baldwin. His ability to capture a systemic quotidian, full of everyday horror and also, importantly, joy, enfolded in the intimacy of family and the complexities of self and identity for Black Americans, with that visceral command and control over words and the English language. His voice can be so wry and gentle, and like it says in the introduction, swinging to a “ferocity” next. It’s like a photograph from which you can’t look away. There are many emotions with which I can identify: how it feels to look upon someone and see a ruin, to lose someone to their own mind, the introspective reflection upon love––how do we know what was real, how to differentiate when the enemy is in the home and was perhaps, once, beloved. And of course, there is much that I have not experienced myself, but the effect of his writing is profound, like Garnette Cadogan’s piece, these twin poles of whimsy and ruthless matter-of-factness. 

It brings to mind the difficulty in walking anywhere in cities that are home to me, or cities that were once home to my grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. The experience of my own home can be so off limits to me, by rules of my own family, by rules of safety in general, that I can find myself as if trapped. My mother reminds me: I chose to go, it is a situation of my own making. I can long for home, but home is only revealed if I am accompanied, in very specific circumstances. One night this past summer I was in a very - shall we say ostentatious - car, and I was so perfectly aware of everyone outside us, how the other people in cars were looking at us. I felt embarrassed. I was ashamed. Here again my mother reminded me, they live in a different world, and like to remind others of it. I felt near tears the entire time I was in the car.

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #3 

I was in two minds about which project to pursue this semester–my work on women and jewellery, or my thesis. Most likely I will work on a project related to the latter, which examines the representation of women courtesans in the Book of Games: Chess, Dices, and Tables (c.1283-84), commissioned under Alfonso X . I find there to be a theoretical gap in the art historical method, between gazing (of which there are multiple types of gazes) and seeing, and I wish to sustain a balance between both as I examine this manuscript. The manuscript, filled with descriptions of types of games of chess in the tradition of Arabic treatises on chess, is perplexing and especially interesting for its illustrations. For each game, there are players illustrated - of various faiths, backgrounds, genders, ages. There are many visual riddles we have yet to understand, if ever.

I would like to build upon this notion of gazes and games in my work for the class. Of course I take direct inspiration from the manuscript, but I am also very attracted to the methods and approaches of Dayanita Singh, an Indian photographer. I have attached some images from Privacy (2004), her photo book which includes images commissioned and her own where she captured portraits of India's unseen elite - images of India that were neither "catastrophic nor exotic." She would photograph "official" family portraits, and in the moment afterwards shoot another picture for her work. At some point in the process she also began to take pictures of rooms just emptied, still bearing the trace of the people who had been there. I am also intrigued by the work of Amrita Sher-Gil, the twentieth century modern painter of Hungarian and Indian descent, as well as the primacy of the colour and eyes in the 1973 poster of the Pakistani National Dance Ensemble, for their performance in New York City. Gazes, games, colour, sight, eyes, women...

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #2 

I grew out of the habit of watching films or television – I rarely like to. I find them too all-consuming or invasive, so I am out of the habit of seeing things. La Haine reminded me in some ways of the Battle of Algiers, the method of regard of scenes of a violent nature, the clock felt akin to a countdown. 

Some things that I noticed: the scenes as they dress and practice in the mirror. How interesting it was to have a hand off in front of the mural with God and Adam’s hands almost touching (I think it’s from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, I could be wrong). How perplexing and sad and predictable that rest and community is so criminalised, it went something to the effect of: “get off the roof,” “there’s no rule, we can be here,” –– some places are “sittable.” Others not, depending on who you are, how you look, how you are presented and perceived. The scene where Hubert is touching his neck at the police station, the circle round of everyone in the station observing them. I loved that moment when Said is on the phone in the washroom, and then the introduction of the fourth man in the washroom, the Siberian work camp and travel in cattle cars. What was with the cow?? 

[photographyatmit]

Blogpost #1

The question of ownership in photography is perplexing to me, there are so many possible scenarios, each contract /instance unique. I have read Ariella Azoulay’s work before, in the context of family photography. Photography is an intimate contract, fulfilled by multiple players and multiple roles––the spectator, the subject, the photographer. Who owns the photograph, the photographic encounter – the photographer, the subject, the spectator, etc.? Azoulay contemplates this question in the legal dimension, arguing then that such concepts of “private property and ownership are foreign to the logic of photography” (98). There is a kind of violence imbued within the claim some photographers make of ownership over the photographed person. 

I wonder at the notion of archive – at the level of the institution and the private. We accept the above morally, ethically but in the world in which we live, photographs (as pieces of art, as records of time and moments) are collected. What does it mean when the enemy, who may be feared and beloved above all else, owns your likenesses, your private faces? Are there not faces which we keep private? What happens when the private is stolen and made someone else’s public, without our consent? I found this especially evocative: "In the Israeli context, for instance, the Palestinians became citizens of the citizenry of photography long before there was any possibility of their becoming citizens in the full meaning of the word," (123); as I think on what it means to be represented in a context, any context, at a given point in time when you may not have had the option to not be.