Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Loss of Decisive Moments or its Endless Continuity: About the Lack of Arresting Pictures from the fields of Death, Despair and Electoral Victories

Deserted streets from all over the world at a given had caught the imagination of the Reuters photographers and the series had become a rage and motivated many other photographers to venture out into the streets and click similar ones. The pictures were eerie in their very appearance but there was a strange beauty to them, a beauty that none had witnessed till then. The undressed virginity of the streets beckoned the human beings who had been locked up for around eight days straight. The photographs were taken on 31st March 2020. Still trying to figure out how to deal with the seclusion imposed on them, human beings were some sort of a living mess without the regular messiness; the cupboards and cutleries remained untouched. Bed lines were not changed. Time slowed down until one could listen to the slow ticking or smooth sailing of the clock hands.

 

The first wave was photogenic in many ways and there was a constant supply of images from all over the world, especially from India; of laborers vanishing into the remote villages, hapless youngsters getting thrashed by the lawless law enforces and images of uncountable and unbearable suffering and pain. Each picture vied for attention; they shrieked from the pages or screens for our conscience to wake up and do something. Dried rotis scattered all over the railway tracks, blistered feet of young and the old, children walking on their toes on the cruelly melting asphalt roads on the days of merciless Indian summer. Artists safely marooned at homes had many images to bite into and chew too; masked human figures were the mildest of them.

 

Somehow the second coming of Corona has not provided the world with arresting photographs. Is it because the pandemic is not now orchestrated itself simultaneously and severely in different parts of the world? May be that is the one reason for the lack of impactful images. People dying in the Indian streets, pavements, in front of the failed health care systems did make touching pictures but the images were still isolated in their frames and too scattered within Indian cities to create a solid and focused impact. The funeral pyres burning even on the residential parks and footpaths, the mass cremations and so on were registered for the world by the BBC photographers. An aerial shot of lights; it was the anti-thesis of that day when the megalomaniac Prime Minister had asked the country to light lamps that night for expressing gratitude to the health workers.

 

Tragedies always do not make good pictures. Prolonged tragedies scarcely make good photographs especially when the decisive points are everywhere, all the time, non-stop. So they make impactful videos and reels, helping television camerapersons to do the needful. Photographs are the static statements of an event whereas video cameras see events as events in its continuity. Or is it the over exposure tragedies through videography that has rendered the photographs of the same event less impactful? I am not sure. I was looking for some interesting photographs from the election campaigns, the winning and losing camps, but could not find any. People were prevented from celebrating the electoral victory considering the pandemic but the photographers were not asked to stay at home. Somehow, none could come up with a good photograph.

 

Photography is a medium that tells lies to establish a truth but relies on a lot of truth when it wants to establish no lie. News photographers and documentary photographers are destined to capture the perceived reality in aesthetically presentable frames. If that is the case, the perceived reality seems to have turned cold and uninspiring, be it the scenes from the pandemic affected locations or from the victory stands of the election candidates. Most of the thanksgiving photographs issued by the political parties and the victorious candidates are not candid; they are photoshopped and airbrushed images. We are in a time when photographs from the real locations do not look real. They may be look like pictures from wastelands nothing but endless agony in offer. Has death and despair killed the photographable moments? Has victory itself gone into the depths of existence to negotiate with the futility of winning and losing?

 

-JohnyML