The artist Vivan Sundaram calls it "archive fever". Photographers Ram Rahman and Raghu Rai describe it as the inevitable progress of technology. Another member of their cohort, Dayanita Singh, has been re-editing and re-purposing old photographs, which she says allows them to "wander from one context to another".
Some of the best-known names in Indian photography are revisiting old bodies of work – most of it, it seems, produced within their own families – by scanning negatives and contact sheets, reworking and reprinting them in various formats, and in the process opening them up to new interpretations and appreciation. Predictions that digital technology would destroy film as a medium now appear shortsighted. In fact, the digital revolution is giving this age-old form a new lease of life.
Sundaram was one of the first to delve into his personal archive, revisiting his grandfather Umrao Singh’s family portraits. He used the revisited photographs in a solo show in 2001, Retake on Amrita. The photographs documented the lives of his aunt, the famous painter Amrita Sher-Gil, her sister Indira (Sundaram’s mother), and his grandmother, a glamorous Hungarian actress. Umrao Singh's photographs date back to the 1950s, and collectively the show spans three decades.
“When technology offered me the possibility of creating photomontages that gave birth to new narratives, I took the process to the next level,” said Sundaram. A photomontage is a composite photo – the result of cutting and joining two or more photographs – that creates the illusion of an unreal object. He was interested in collapsing boundaries of time and space, placing the past and present in both confrontation and agreement.
Take, for instance, the photomontage that places Umrao Singh, wearing a langoti, in a bourgeois living room in which Sher-Gil sits dressed in an evening gown and strappy shoes in front of her painting of Boris Tazlitsky, a lover from her time in Paris. The intentional juxtaposition of three protagonists in one room creates an interesting tension, lanced with sexual undertones.
Sundaram is now working on a huge project for the Victoria Memorial museum in Kolkata, chronicling the visual history of Bengal through an exhibition and "memory book".
Dayanita Singh’s point of departure from conventional photojournalism came with her exhibition and book, Myself Mona Ahmed in 2001 on her intimate friendship with Mona, a eunuch. But in the years since she has developed her ideas on the photo-archive, making it both subject and form.
File Room from 2013 is Singh’s tribute to analogue recording. The curatorial note on her website describes it as an elegy to paper – a medium that it says she has a unique relationship with – in this age of digitisation of information and knowledge. The images show stacks of files sitting on dusty shelves in various bureaucratic archives, and seek to capture their own architecture and atmosphere, rooted, at once, in both past and present.
Singh has also revived her mother Nony Singh’s photographs, compiling them into a book, Nony Singh: The Archivist. Again, the photographs are mostly family shots – a young Dayanita dressed prettily, with her sister and cousins – but also shots of her husband’s girlfriends, before their marriage. Singh’s mini-retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013 pays homage to Nony, alongside some of her own work.
The photographer Ram Rahman first revisited his own negatives for his solo show Bioscope in 2008. “At the time, it made sense to make most of the prints digitally,” he said. “Silver gelatin was already difficult to do on a large scale and the new Ilford albumen papers for digital printers had just come into the market. It was now possible to match the silver print very accurately. I could also make prints larger than in the darkroom, since I had done my own printing.”
“I can calibrate my digital prints to match silver prints quite closely,” he said. To him, this new digital era is simply another stage in what is already a technological medium.
While advancing technology has enabled revisiting analogue images, it has also birthed the selfie. “Images made on film are from the time when we really had to limit our shooting because of the material," he said. "It made one more thoughtful of the act of picture-making. The freedom the digital age has unleashed has made the considered image very rare.”
A recent exhibition by Rai, Trees, put on display film negatives of memorable moments during his career as a photojournalist.
“The history of Indian modern photography has only started surfacing now,” said Sundaram, “and Raja Deendayal and Umrao Singh, working in the 1950s, are considered pioneers. In the last decade, we’ve seen an increased engagement with the archiving and retrieval of vintage photography.” This is a vital step, if we are to ensure the negatives are not lost from public memory.
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Credit: Habib Rahman.
Some of the best-known names in Indian photography are revisiting old bodies of work – most of it, it seems, produced within their own families – by scanning negatives and contact sheets, reworking and reprinting them in various formats, and in the process opening them up to new interpretations and appreciation. Predictions that digital technology would destroy film as a medium now appear shortsighted. In fact, the digital revolution is giving this age-old form a new lease of life.
Sundaram was one of the first to delve into his personal archive, revisiting his grandfather Umrao Singh’s family portraits. He used the revisited photographs in a solo show in 2001, Retake on Amrita. The photographs documented the lives of his aunt, the famous painter Amrita Sher-Gil, her sister Indira (Sundaram’s mother), and his grandmother, a glamorous Hungarian actress. Umrao Singh's photographs date back to the 1950s, and collectively the show spans three decades.
“When technology offered me the possibility of creating photomontages that gave birth to new narratives, I took the process to the next level,” said Sundaram. A photomontage is a composite photo – the result of cutting and joining two or more photographs – that creates the illusion of an unreal object. He was interested in collapsing boundaries of time and space, placing the past and present in both confrontation and agreement.
Credit: Vivan Sundaram.
Take, for instance, the photomontage that places Umrao Singh, wearing a langoti, in a bourgeois living room in which Sher-Gil sits dressed in an evening gown and strappy shoes in front of her painting of Boris Tazlitsky, a lover from her time in Paris. The intentional juxtaposition of three protagonists in one room creates an interesting tension, lanced with sexual undertones.
Credit: Vivan Sundaram.
Sundaram is now working on a huge project for the Victoria Memorial museum in Kolkata, chronicling the visual history of Bengal through an exhibition and "memory book".
Dayanita Singh’s point of departure from conventional photojournalism came with her exhibition and book, Myself Mona Ahmed in 2001 on her intimate friendship with Mona, a eunuch. But in the years since she has developed her ideas on the photo-archive, making it both subject and form.
File Room from 2013 is Singh’s tribute to analogue recording. The curatorial note on her website describes it as an elegy to paper – a medium that it says she has a unique relationship with – in this age of digitisation of information and knowledge. The images show stacks of files sitting on dusty shelves in various bureaucratic archives, and seek to capture their own architecture and atmosphere, rooted, at once, in both past and present.
Installation, Dayanita Singh.
Singh has also revived her mother Nony Singh’s photographs, compiling them into a book, Nony Singh: The Archivist. Again, the photographs are mostly family shots – a young Dayanita dressed prettily, with her sister and cousins – but also shots of her husband’s girlfriends, before their marriage. Singh’s mini-retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2013 pays homage to Nony, alongside some of her own work.
Credit: Nony Singh.
The photographer Ram Rahman first revisited his own negatives for his solo show Bioscope in 2008. “At the time, it made sense to make most of the prints digitally,” he said. “Silver gelatin was already difficult to do on a large scale and the new Ilford albumen papers for digital printers had just come into the market. It was now possible to match the silver print very accurately. I could also make prints larger than in the darkroom, since I had done my own printing.”
Credit: Ram Rahman.
Rahman has also revisited his father’s negatives, most of which have been shot with a Rolleiflex. He is in the process of sharing, “bit by bit”, the photographs his father took of his own architecture and of his mother dancing, as well as portraits and everyday family shots.
Credit: Habib Rahman.
“I can calibrate my digital prints to match silver prints quite closely,” he said. To him, this new digital era is simply another stage in what is already a technological medium.
While advancing technology has enabled revisiting analogue images, it has also birthed the selfie. “Images made on film are from the time when we really had to limit our shooting because of the material," he said. "It made one more thoughtful of the act of picture-making. The freedom the digital age has unleashed has made the considered image very rare.”
Credit: Ram Rahman.
One of India’s most famous photographers, Raghu Rai, agreed. “I’m not nostalgic about the old methods of photography,” he said. “Digital gives you great freedom to shoot any number of images. However, it also engenders a certain lack of depth and tapasya (the effort to achieve self-realisation). The younger generation lacks tapasya and self-discipline because technology has made us less self-reliant. Shooting on film requires a certain discipline. I still believe in printing photographs as a physical entity.”
A recent exhibition by Rai, Trees, put on display film negatives of memorable moments during his career as a photojournalist.
Credit: Raghu Rai.
Credit: Raghu Rai.
“The history of Indian modern photography has only started surfacing now,” said Sundaram, “and Raja Deendayal and Umrao Singh, working in the 1950s, are considered pioneers. In the last decade, we’ve seen an increased engagement with the archiving and retrieval of vintage photography.” This is a vital step, if we are to ensure the negatives are not lost from public memory.