The India issue

Portrait Christian Witkin India is endlessly multi-coloured and of an almost inconceivable diversity. A barely comprehensible country, in which it is almost impossible to reduce all the cultures, ethnic groups, religions and classes to one common denominator. Unless that denominator is Christian Witkin.

The first images this Dutchman thinks of when he considers the phenomenon India are a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi and the brothers in Slumdog Millionaire. Made by an American photographer in 1948 and a British director in 2008 respectively, as if amongst 1.2 billion Indians not one photographer is to be found.

Indian Photo graphy in the 21st century “Photography, in its early Indian incarnation, came out looking like a villain,” says anthropologist and art historian Christopher Pinney. He refers to the fact that, in the early years, photography in India was mainly a matter of surveillance and identification, imposed by the colonial regime.

The Dutch photographer Desiree Dolron (1963) is one of the most successful artists of her generation. Her work can be found in the collections of major museums, including The Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In 2005, she had a solo exhibition in the The Hague Museum for Photography.

Interview Prashant Panjiar After two hours of listening to Prashant Panjiar’s life stories, views and dreams, we are seated at his coffee table, which is covered with a great stack of photography books. They are all by Indian photographers, because one thing he can’t emphasise enough: he isn’t the only Indian photographer worth admiring. True as that may be, Panjiar has over three decades of impressive photography to his name, and his humbleness only adds to his credibility.

Gauri Gill (1970, Chandigarh) studied art in Delhi but soon after graduating moved to the United States to earn her BFA and MFA in photography. In a dramatic period of political transition (2000-2007), she documented how Indian identity merges within a larger American plurality. This series is an intimate portrayal of the Indian diaspora as much as it is an homage to Robert Frank’s Americans; it is a humorous, poignant, ironic, paradoxical and sometimes beguiling signification of global multi-cultural mundane life.

Life is Elsewhere by Sohrab Hura (1982, Dehli) is a sentimental journey full of youthful doubts and contradictions, resulting from a sheer need to experience everything that was about to disappear. It was in the summer of 1999 that his mother was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia. Over the years, the walls of their home started to peel off, and all that remained were the traces of a life that no longer existed. Her paranoia and his personal embarrassment and anger over this left a void, but Hura eventually came to realise that his mother had never stopped loving him.

Bharat Sikka (1973, Delhi) was raised and worked as a photographer in India, but eventually decided to study at the Parson's School of Design, where he earned a BFA in photography. Tired of the stereotypical portrayal of Indian people, Sikka decided to point his camera away from the familiar female models in order to focus on urban men from the sub-continent. Instead of the snake charmer, sadhu or guy in a slum, we now get to see candid portraits of his father, friends, father-in-law and other relatives, acting as themselves.

As you might have noticed, we never have enough space to put everything we like about a theme in one issue. We’re working on getting this fixed by using the World Wide Web more in future endeavours, but for now we’re sticking to four mini-portfolios. We can’t show you the whole series but we can give you a good feel for them. We therefore strongly recommend that you track down your photographer of interest and talk to them personally about their work… although visiting their websites may be a more efficient option. By the way, all four photographers are based in The Netherlands.