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RECOVERING SRINAGAR

Feature Photography and the Subversive  Politics of the Decisive Moment

SUSHMA GRIFFIN

 

Abstract:

With a specific focus on the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning images of life in Indian administered Kashmir by Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan, and Dar Yasin, this essay explores the capacity of photography to foster social bonds of citizenry in the face of precarity. Tracing the development of feature photography’s tradition of candour or spontaneity, the piece examines how the subversive potential of Henri Cartier Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’ acts as a catalyst for the photographs, highlighting the tension between hope and futility as central to their aesthetics of protest.

 

 

Three Kashmiri photographers Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan, and Dar Yasin were awarded the 2020 ‘Feature Photography’ Pulitzer Prize for their pictures from Srinagar captured during a 7-month-long media and communications blackout imposed by the Indian Government.[i] Their photographs were produced during a period of immense tumult as journalists struggled to release information from the enclosed city. The Indian Government had restricted internet access—a fundamental human right under Article 19 of the Indian Constitution—in Jammu and Kashmir, rationalising this move on the basis of national security concerns.[ii] The photographs by Anand, Khan, and Yasin visualise Srinagar’s residents in a range of images, portraying them not only in acts of militancy but also within familial and community settings. This essay explores how Anand, Khan, and Yasin, as insiders, draw on their access and intimate knowledge of Srinagar and its people to provide a voice for its protesting communities. The photographs are a sustained meditation on the unevenness of life under military occupation.

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The extant literature on the documentary tradition suggests that the presuppositions of objectivity and neutrality are no longer relevant to its discourse. However, the defining attribute of feature photography remains its candour or its unstaged appearance. A feature photograph illustrates and illuminates the non-fictional narrative of a news story to which it draws attention. Invented by Henri Cartier-Bresson for the French title of his book Images à la Sauvette (1952), the English phrase the “decisive moment”, was in fact concocted by his editor Dick Swann.[iii] Swann’s translation more closely reflects Cartier-Bresson’s intentioned meaning of being “witness to the transitory”.[iv] Although the ideology underpinning the ‘decisive moment’ is seemingly the interruption of time, the construction of Carter-Bresson’s images can instead be located in their suturing of unusual, unconnected events.

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Appropriating the paradigm of the ‘decisive moment’,  Anand, Khan, and Yassin harness its subversive potential for the aestheticisation of violence. In doing so, they shift its operations from what Cartier-Bresson termed a ““prägnanz” atmosphere of balance, harmony, simplicity, and unity” to reveal its political philosophy and the possibilities of its rhetorical strategies (the term prägnanz suggests that the brain simplifies complex visual cues  to make sense of the phenomenon or environment being perceived). Discussing the ‘decisive moment’ the photographer Alistair Crawford, suggests that the “reality that dogs him [Cartier-Bresson’s photographs] always appears to be bizarre, ironic, surreal. Meaning is not so much revealed as made to fit.” [v] For Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment emerges from a continuing desire to relate the unrelated and to locate the unexpected in the mundane. This is exemplified in Dar Yasin’s photo A masked Kashmiri protester jumps on the bonnet of an armored vehicle of Indian police as he throws stones at it during a protest in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Friday, May 31, 2019 in which the protagonist is suspended in a gravity-defying encounter with a machine.[vi] The image weaponises the protestor’s body against the might of the state, following the iconic Tankman from Tiananmen Square (c. 1989).[vii] The immediacy of the photograph and its vivid detail point to the futility of the protestor’s actions; the intended damage from the stone-throwing is cancelled by the anticipatory barbed-wire of the armoured vehicle’s windscreen. In its aesthetic and historiographic modes, however, the photograph evokes the biblical parable of David and Goliath, in which the weaker opponent’s guile and agility hold sway, foreshadowing hope for Kashmiri Muslims in their enduring struggle for self-autonomy.[viii] The caption records the image-capture on Friday, or ‘Al-Jumah’, which has special social and political valences for Muslims as the day for congregation in the Islamic holy book of the Quran. Contingency, the central element of Yasin’s aesthetics of protest, is a reminder that the act of interpreting a photograph cannot be thought of exclusively within the terms of what appears on its surface, but is reliant on the histories, circumstances and conditions that make it possible.[ix]

           

Through sympathetic portrayals, rendered largely in a monochromatic palette, the camera highlights the vulnerabilities of its subjects. This is exemplified in Mukhtar Khan’s intimate portrait of young Kashmiri Muslim girls reciting the Quran on the first day of Ramadan. Recontextualising  Kashmir’s seductive natural landscape for the collective imagination, the photographs at times ironically romanticise the adversary, as can be seen in  Channi Anand’s unexpected view of an Indian soldier standing vigil in a field of tall maize at the border with Pakistan. The images, however, largely voice the pain of the collective.

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These photographs constitute what Ariella Azoulay calls the “citizenry of photography”.[x] The artful use of the vantage point, camera angle and framing activates photography’s civil contract (with a nod to Azoulay) by collapsing the schism between the photographer-viewer and their subject. In upholding the agency of their protesting protagonists, the photographs oppose the historical concept of documentary criticised by the photographer and critic Allan Sekula as the ““find-a-bum” school of concerned photography”.[xi] The conceptual artist Martha Rosler discusses how in the early mode of documentary, which made its appearance in the Farm Security Administration Project notably in the photographs by Dorothy Lange and Walker Evans (c. 1937-42), the camera was mobilised for meliorist (or the idea that progress leads to the betterment of society) social work. It engaged its subjects in an intensity of downwards-pointing close-ups, framing them in starkly cropped views, prefiguring the victimisation of its own subjects. Images from New York city by Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine (c. 1960s) hypostasise the penurious existence of slum dwellers and immigrant experience, and also exemplify early-documentary’s social form, which according to Rosler “manages to institute a new genre of victimhood . . . by someone else’s camera.”[xii]

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From their perspective as fellow citizens, however, the still images by Anand, Khan, and Yasin are a careful recording of unfolding events. The pictures address the gap between “what was seen” in the photograph and “what can actually be seen”, conveying their active participation within the triangulated relations of the photographer, image and subject.[xiii] Framed strategically, through select vantage points, lighting and cropping that bring to attention the intense violence of administered Kashmir, the images refract the struggle of their protagonists, extending the very same experiences to their viewers. The beauty haunting the images bears hope, reprising the key theme of violence. It is, however, the ambivalence between hope and futility that structures the experiences of these photographs. What really comes to light, then, is the capacity of photography to foster social bonds of citizenry in the face of precarity. 

 

 

[i] The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “feature story” as a “distinctive or prominent article in a newspaper, magazine, etc.” https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/Entry/68848?redirectedFrom=feature+story#eid1218669620. Accessed on January 7, 2021.

[ii] In 2019, the Bhartiya Janata Party-led Indian government revoked Kashmir’s long-standing special autonomous status that had been guaranteed in 1954 by the special articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution. Understandably, local activism expanded and amplified when the Indian military moved in to impose order. For an in-depth analysis of Kashmir’s historical and political contexts, see J. B. D. Gupta, Jammu and Kashmir, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2012).

[iii] In its literal translation from the French, the phrase is termed as “mages on the run” or “hurrying images”. Alistair Crawford, “That Decisive Moment: Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908–2004”, Photoresearcher 8 (September 2005): 5.

[iv] Alistair Crawford, “That Decisive Moment: Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908–2004”, Photoresearcher 8 (September 2005): 5.

[v] Alistair Crawford, “That Decisive Moment: Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908–2004”, Photoresearcher 8 (September 2005): 6.

[vi] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/channi-anand-mukhtar-khan-and-dar-yasin-associated-press. Accessed March 18, 2020

[vii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man#/media/File:Tank_Man_(Tiananmen_Square_protester).jpg. Accessed March 18, 2020

[viii] In its position as disputed territory between India and Pakistan, the region’s majoritarian sectarian Muslim politics are complex. War crimes have been perpetrated across all the partisan groups including the Muslim separatists as well as the Hindu loyalists, and the Indian military. For instance, Srinagar’s Hindu residents (a population of around 100,000) left the Kashmir Valley in 2009 in a mass exodus resulting from the communal tensions of Muslim separatist action. 

[ix] Eduardo Cadava, “At the Threshold of Life and Death”, European Journal of English Studies, 16.3 (December 2012): 244.

[x] Ariella Azoulay, “The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography” Afterimage 33.2 (September / October 2005): 38-44.

[xi] Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation), The Massachusetts Review, 19.4 (Winter, 1978): 867.

[xii] Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)”, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2004), 187.

[xiii] Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, trans. Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli (N.J: Princeton University Press, 2008), 93-94.