Coronavirus India | Has Kajodi Reached Home? | Our South Sudan Moment

Photographer - Salik Ahmad -
Captioned: 90-year-old Kajodi trudges home 400 km away amid coronavirus lockdown.
Published in - https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/india-news-90-year-old-kajodi-trudges-home-400-km-away-amid-coronavirus-lockdown/349525

Many years ago, the Wanted Series initiated the dialogue on ethics in photography. A seminar was organised at Max Muller Bhavan Delhi in collaboration with Goa-Cap and Askar. Subsequently, the Goethe Institute at New Delhi tried to formulate a working group which would explore the question of Ethics in photographic practices. A large seminar was followed by a couple of close think-thank meeting, and then we all disappeared. Going back to the conversation that we generated, I remember being numbed by the impossibility of it all. Yet, ethics as praxis and as a concept metaphor has always remained important to me as a critical tool while looking at (looking through) any cultural act or artefact. In today's world, we can no longer hold on to the notion of a 'Universal Good'. Over the years my notions of ethics have been shaped by moral negotiation processes, red-flagging arbitrariness or manipulation.

 Kevin Carter, 'The vulture and the Little Girl',  first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. Image taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_girl 

'The Vulture and the Little Girl' is perhaps one of the earliest instances in recent memory which threw up grave questions regarding ethics in photojournalist practices.  Initially, Carter claimed to have come upon the scene, snapped a few photos, and then chased the bird away. 

 "You won't believe what I've just shot! … I was shooting this kid on her knees, and then changed my angle, and suddenly there was this vulture right behind her! … And I just kept shooting – shot lots of films.  Silva asked him where he shot the picture and was looking around to take a photo as well. Carter pointed to a place 50 m (160 ft) away. Then Carter told him that he had chased the vulture away. He told Silva he was shocked by the situation he had just photographed, saying, "I see all this, and all I can think of is Megan", his young daughter. "   (https://joesackcom.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/the-vulture-and-the-child-what-happened-next/) 

These were Carter's immediate words to his colleague João Silva, (a part of the Bang- Bang Club specialising in reporting from conflict areas). However, Carter eventually admitted that he watched the scene for about twenty minutes, waiting for the vulture to get closer to the boy and hoping that it would spread its wings for a more dramatic photo. After the vulture refused to move, Carter finally chased the bird away. 

Salik Ahmad's ' 90-year-old Kajodi trudges home 400 km away amid coronavirus lockdown' succeeded in spotlighting the effect of CONVID lockdown on the migrant labourers of India, apart from photo narrating plights of victims during the conflict, it also bears similarity to Carter's image in the use of dramatic foreshortening and depth-of-field. There is one crucial difference and this perhaps reflects the culture of consumption in our times. The readers of Outlook and the online viewers of the image raised no question regarding the fate of Kajodi. How did the photographer intervene in a human capacity? Did he (even) offer her some water to drink? Has Kajodi reached home?

 Many years ago…in the early 90’s Cater and New York times had to face these questions and these questions made the photographer and publication realise that lines between being a photographer and being a human being could not be blurred beyond a point. Carter’s eventual suicide about 5 years after taking the photograph should not be directly linked to the psyco-emotional impact of 'The Vulture and the Little Girl'.  He had seen enough morbid violence and death in South Africa and Sudan for any sensitive soul to be deeply affected.

Contrary to perception, photojournalism has an uneasy relationship with ‘truth’. The ‘girl’ from South Sudan turned out to be a boy, and Carter framed the shot to maximise the impression that this disaster was taking place in the ‘middle of nowhere’ where in reality it was on a runway with her parents just a few minutes away in a place surrounded by UN workers and journalists. In Salik Ahmad's work, I do not know if her name is really Kajodi, is she really 90 years old? Is her village really 400 km away? Such details get lost in the spectacle of a tragedy and conflict generates. In a way, way beyond truth, this is a work in the politics of representation. 

Photographers easily forget that their subject matter is (at least) an equal collaborator in the economic and cultural capital a picture produces. They also (always) forget that they are very much a part of the frame, that they exist within the photograph and not outside it. If political photography and photojournalism want to break through the structures they critique, these realisations are important.

Anish Kapoor | Death of the Conceptual

AESTHETICIZING POLITICS VERSUS POLITICIZNG AESTHETICS

Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (2006) following the artist’s recent recoating in Vantablack (photo courtesy City of Chicago)
via http://hyperallergic.com/287628/anish-kapoor-coats-cloud-gate-in-the-darkest-black-known-to-humanity/

To get to the heart of Kapoor's thinking and making we must register the difference between physicality of void space, and truly made emptiness. Let us use Heidegger 's beautiful parable of the jug for these purposes. What does the potter make when he shapes the jug? Of what material is the jug made? The potter forms the sides and bottom of the jug in clay to provide the means for it to stand, to be vertical; to make the jug a holding vessel, however, he has to shape the void. 'From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel… . The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.'

Homi Bhaba, The True Sign of Emptiness
http://anishkapoor.com/185/making-emptiness-by-homi-k-bhabha

Anish Kapoor has been creating lavish, sensual abstract, sculptural forms for over four decades. Over the years he has been rated as one of the best contemporary sculptors, and in a way as the 'master of public art'. Homi Bhaba in his analytical eulogy of Kapoor, offers us Kapoor as the ‘maker of emptiness’. In this short piece stems from my discomfort with how Bhaba gets so lost in the philosophy of emptiness that he becomes completely blind to materiality and its impact on the politics of visual culture. 

The blind spot that Bhaba and Kapoor share for ‘thingness’ and materiality is not new. This is the blind spot shared by the genre of makers and thinkers whom we can call neo liberal conceptual artists. This group that has grown to be rich and powerful, twisted the radical possibilities of conceptual art. Conceptual art as a practice emerged at a time when the authority of the art institution and the preciousness of the unique aesthetic object were being widely challenged and artists felt the need to interrogate the possibilities of art-as-idea or art-as-knowledge. It was a breakaway from formalism, bringing in a new philosophy of materiality. The neo liberal contemporary group has managed to quote  the linguistic, mathematical, and process-oriented dimensions of  conceptual art , yet has gone on to support and buffer the very hegemonic systems, structures, and processes conceptual art poised itself against.

The popularity of conceptual thought in contemporary art practices has created a moment of oxymoron in art history. At one level, bowing to the pressures from corporate and museums that are mediated through gallery practices, artist have to large scale fabrications and have effectively become cultural producers. There is a visual dominance of the large, the phallic, of the archival, of the vaginal and of the spectacular.  Materiality, finish and longevity have become more and more important for artists who claim their art has got nothing to do with the ‘thingness’ and exist purely in conceptual terms.  It is this oxymoron that results in a situation where Anish Kapoor patents the blackest colour, claims that it is the darkest colour, thereby showing a complete lack of conceptual understanding about darkness. Nor does he explore the politics of the concept metaphor called 'black'. Just like the modernist masters for him it is a 'pure aesthectic' engagement.One can forgive Kapoor for this blind spot, but how does one forgive Bhaba?  The coat of Vatablack on the Cloud Gate gives a fantastic sense of a dark void, visually flattening out its voluptuous form.  If anything the ‘thingness’ is the only thing left visible, yet it is the very thing Bhaba and Kapoor deny. 

The collapse of discourse over skill , materiality as art history was run over by literary studies has lead to primarily semiotic , interpretations of art works even though it remains well known that image and objects carry an excess which cannot be reduced to textual interpretations. Questions of ethics and politics got swept away by the neo liberal market economy and a middle class distracted by its manufactured desire. Ethics of course has become unfashionable, but politics has gone on to become a decorative motif. Most of our contemporary masters make work in which the politics of making is in opposition to the political content of the work.  Conceptual art becomes an easy escape door for these artists , by denying the ‘thingness’ they can escape the politics of its making .