Time and Photography

After that little boast from yesterday about being able to think up a post while doing other things, I find myself today with time to write and no coherent post at hand. *Smh*. Bugger**.

"Why not, F.D.?" You might ask, indignantly.

Because, y'all! Squee! I spent most of my day today looking for End-of-Blogathon Gifts. I'm trying to look for gifts that I can make (oi! Stop With The Scoffing) - because, you know, that's more meaningful and fun! (More Squee!)

I may, or may not, but most certainly have narrowed down the possibilities to two things. But no... I'm not telling. You'll just have to wait to see what you get. (Mostly because my ability for skillful artisty DIY things ranks only slightly above my skill for underwater-breathing-without-assistance. Oh well.)

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(Edited to Add a post that was on hand, after all)

And then, there's that thing about Photography - Pearls & Jade - seems to be doing a series on Photos from her trips and the questions that they bring up. Her posts have made me think about the idea of photography as well.

When she talks of an Orientalist / postcolonial view through the lens, my mind turns to Zizek recently saying:

If you mention the phrase “postcolonialism,” I say, “Fuck it!” Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.

(As an aside, What would Prof. M say about this, Pearls & Jade? Would you ask him for me?) 

I find this (perhaps naively) problematic.

I'm not saying Bhabha always makes sense or that Spivak is always right. (In fact, I often emphatically think this is *not* the case). But this blanket rubbishing of postocoloniality as a political correct piece of crap is much too facile for my liking.

Take, for instance, the way in which the foreign is adored and elevated in India even today (no joke, I saw ads for a Salon on the streets of my hometown showing blonde-haired blue-eyed women. Wtf is that!) That is symptomatic of a larger residual love of the foreign, the white - a thing that comes from the Colony.

Sure, the autowallah, or the ektara player on the streets of Rajasthan may not phrase it like this or even see it this way. But that doesn't make it the exclusive imagining of rich Indian academics capitalizing on white guilt.

*Ahem* I totally went off script here.

What I was going to talk about was the Ethics of Photo-taking.

Photography, as is often widely acknowledged, is voyeuristic. I'm not sure it is possible to take (or see) a photograph divorced from this impulse.

But then, it is also a record for posterity of a fleeting moment. It is a communication of how I see a specific moment (what Bresson calls the decisive moment) in all of time and space. A poignant, meaningful photograph then, is the perfect union of subject and object.

Henri Cartier Bresson says it so beautifullly:

...photography is the simultaneous recognition in a fraction of a second of a significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of form which gives that event its proper expression....for reactive living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds: the one inside us, and the one outside us. As a result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one. And it is this world that we must communicate. 

And if this reflection is retrospective, like Pearl & Jade's, I think, it is revelatory - of one's mindset in different moments in time. And that cannot, to my mind, be anything other than good. 

Of course, all this is armchair philosophizing on taking photographs etc.

I'm just going to end on this photograph that I took more than a year ago, while visiting a dear and adorable friend in Albany, NY.

**Nod to my dear friend, Australo. For Today's Phone conversation.