Why Asian Photography?

Under what circumstances is national or cultural context important to understanding a photograph?

Depends on who is doing the understanding, why and for whom. There is a way of looking at, archiving, understanding and writing about photography that is entirely historical, sociological or anthropological. And here context is all-important. Usually, this kind of writing is academic and specialized; aesthetic criteria are irrelevant or subordinated to the more levelling gaze of the social sciences. The (usually hierarchical) distinctions between art and not-art, or between documentary, popular, commercial, journalistic or art photography, do not apply in such readings. So, if we are, say, studying representations of women, or immigrants, or dwarfs, then we should be looking at every kind of photography from advertisements, police shots and ethnographic records to photo-essays in Granta and the work of Arbus, Salgado or Iturbide, without getting into disputes as to whether what we are looking at is art or not, or if it is art, then whether we are looking at good art or bad art. We are more interested here in content, rather than form, and we are producing critical knowledge using photographs as primary documents. We could have chosen to look at folksongs or newspapers or films, and done the same sort of work with them, without bothering very much about aesthetics (although the aesthetic or formal aspects of these documents could make our interpretations more nuanced and layered).

But the moment we get into questions of a different kind of meaning or affect (that is, once we take photography into art galleries, art auctions and art publishing houses), and raise questions of beauty and form and aesthetic, emotional or intellectual impact, then the role of context, especially national context, becomes far more ambivalent and complicated. A different set of priorities and criteria, together with a different kind of politics, takes over. Someone should write about the Politics of Contextualization, and about how a great deal of academic work is structured by that politics. For instance, why is it that Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Eggleston, the Bechers or Jeff Wall is Photography, whereas Graciela Iturbide is Mexican photography or Dayanita Singh Indian photography? I suspect this is not only political, but also geopolitical, going back to the ancient geographical divides in post-Enlightenment European epistemology: Who looks at whom? Who studies whom? Who writes about whom? Who is the subject, and who the object, of knowledge and interpretation? And the related questions: What do we need to know in order to understand a Western artist? And what do we need to know in order to understand an Asian artist? Who are ‘we’? In the first case, not very much context is required because Western art is assumed to be universal, transcending national or geographic differences. It is Art. But Asian art is not Art, it is Asian art. Therefore, a learned understanding of the various contexts in which it is produced is essential for doing it justice: it must always be tied to its time and place. So, Dayanita Singh cannot depict loss, absence or fear, but must always represent upper-class India or, in her more recent work, the desolation of industrial India. We hardly ever have books, articles, photo-book introductions or catalogue essays explaining what is Belgian, French, Canadian or American about Belgian, French, Canadian or American photography because we are expected to respond to Belgian, French, Canadian or American photographs as we respond to the Venus de Milo or the Mona Lisa, without having to know about Classical Greece or Renaissance Italy. But not so for ‘Asian photography’. An entirely different approach to looking, understanding and knowing has to be constructed, mastered, disseminated and repeatedly invoked for such a category to be taken seriously in the global field of vision. This applies not only to those who are looking at it, showing it, collecting it and writing about it, but also to those who are making it. That is, Asian photographers themselves often end up internalizing this way of seeing and start producing work for it and from within it, presenting their work in books and in shows according to its requirements. They readily accept the ‘contexts’ in which their work is invariably read, and then start perpetuating that reading of their work, together with the assumptions that inform these readings, by actually producing work that can be written about, shown and taught within these prefabricated frames and perspectives. Non-Asia looks at Asia in a certain way, and therefore Asia looks at, and projects itself, like that too. A couple of centuries ago, this was called Colonialism or Imperialism. Then Edward Said called it Orientalism. Now it is called Context, and the right-minded, well-intentioned, academically respectable sound of the word obscures the structures of power/knowledge/funding that create this primacy of Context.

This is why I am profoundly uncomfortable with the notion of Asia (or any other region) as context – especially when that notion is created and sustained in the non-Asian parts of the world, and then globalized.

William Gedney, Street at Night with Man Sleeping, 1970. © William Gedney Collection, Duke University Rare Book,Manuscript, and Special Collections Library

After “Spring Snow,” by Yukio Mishima, chapter 34, 2000-2005. Color photograph. 57.4 x 74 cm. © Jeff Wall. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Three Questions

1. Does it matter that Gedney was American?
2. Does it matter that Wall is Canadian?
3. Are these Asian photographs?

Aveek Sen is the Senior Assistant Editor for The Telegraph, Calcutta, India. He also reviews books, films, classical music, art, and photography, and is the 2010 winner of the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in Writing. Sen is currently working on a book on the intersections of photography, literature, cinema, and the other visual arts.