Art vs camera
A decent camera or a cell-phone can make a photographer of you, just as pen and paper can make a “writer” of a filing clerk: so, does efficient handling of such instruments become your passport to the art world? The discussion on the concluding day of “Home and the Street” at Studio21 addressed such related questions: “When does photography become art?”
Curated by British photographer Christopher Taylor, the show featured the work of Sumit Basu, Jayanta Saha, Kushal Ray, Nilanjan Ray and Saibal Das. Das was also part of the panel that included photographers Sunil Dutta and Dev Nayak, alongside Amlan Das Gupta, who teaches English at Jadavpur University.
The tone of the evening was set by Das Gupta, who began with another question: “Can photography be an art?”
Referring to the German thinker, Walter Benjamin, he wondered that if something can be replicated time and again, could it ever be called art? Such a question not only shook established notions of originality but also posed a challenge to photographers who wanted their work to cross over from journalism and advertising into the finer realm of art galleries and museums.
Photography, Das said, becomes art when it conveys “something beyond information”. Nayak confessed his ignorance of how that transition takes place. It is best, he said, to compare photography with writing — what a society reads into a photograph makes its aesthetic value. Nayak feels that in India, the obsession with the technical know-how of photography tends to obscure merit. Good work speaks for itself, no matter how it is produced.
A member of the audience asked the panellists if they introduce themselves as “photographers” or as “artists”. Although the question was not directly answered, Sunil Dutta said that such divisions were irrelevant. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
While there can be no quarrel with this position, the evening ended somewhat inconclusively, though not before some feisty comments from the audience. One gentleman held forth on the all-too-pertinent fear of a different kind of reproducibility: the trap of cliches set by Varanasi, Old Calcutta and family portraits.
Unfazed, Das said that it didn’t matter to him who had photographed Chitpur in whatever way before him so long as he is able to connect with his subject “emotionally”.