Winding lanes and the smell of baking bread lead the way to a repository of memory. Packed to the rafters in a studio in Mumbai’s ChuimVillage, which spans the neighbourhoods of Bandra and Khar, are relics tracing global histories. I see books on Soviet literature from 1983; I see Baburnama , excerpts from the Mahabharata and Jeffrey Archer books. The space belongs to CAMP, a collaborative studio set up by artist Ashok Sukumaran and filmmaker Shaina Anand in 2007.
Their raw material being primarily archives, Anand and Sukumaran surround themselves with empty DVD boxes of Aparajito and Pather Panchali , and stacks of magazine and newspaper clippings. Adding now to CAMP’s archive are the mammoth photo archives of The Hindu. Their project titled A Photogenetic Line, which is as much about art as it is about history, has been commissioned by the upcoming Chennai Photo Biennale.
50 artists, 13 countries
The biennale is showing works by over 50 artists from 13 countries, across venues in Chennai. CAMP’s installation will be a 100-ft sequence of images, produced from The Hindu photo archives, and will be displayed at the impressive Senate House. For the work, the cut-outs are slices of approximately 85 lakh images.
Sukumaran points to a cupboard covered with a small example of the puzzle — with images of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. At Lahore’s railway station in 1939, of him sitting in the train, and another of him talking to an army of redshirts. In another shot, from 1986, he visits Delhi for medical treatment and is received by Rajiv Gandhi. The story then follows Gandhi, who then becomes the protagonist of the story.
Photo: CAMP
Anand and Sukumaran are experts at sifting through mounds of information. Their online archival projects are Pad.ma, with a bank of 5,000 annotated videos, and Indiancine.ma, which houses 41,400 entries. Sukumaran says their new project shows what kind of narrative archives can produce beyond just a thematic one of, say, place, year, or a single topic. “We were led to exploring how two images may talk to, or follow each other in a sequence.”
The sequence of images follows certain rules, the first of which is that “people grow older, or younger”; the second principle is that “things in the background come into the foreground, or vice versa”; and the third is “two photo captions refer to each other.”
Visual package
The rules become clearer when looking at A Photogenetic Line as a work in progress. At their studio, I witness a mere 5% of the planned installation, as we move across photographs of a Jayalalithaa poster flying in the wind in Tirunelveli on May 11, 2016, visuals of The Hindu office in Anna Salai that was enveloped in flames (February 8, 2013), and images of the Northeastern States, of Jammu and Kashmir, and scenes from the pre-Partition era.
Photo: CAMP
In a way, the manipulation of these photographs breaks the heaviness of history. It allows the viewer breathing space to appreciate the event in a tactile arrangement, using the same composition, but in a different frame. “With cut-outs, the four edges of a photograph are being redone. The border of one image makes a jump into the consequent image,” says Sukumaran. It’s a play on the panoramic tool of photography, but by juxtaposing different scenes as opposed to a singular moment.
Photo: CAMP
I ask the duo how they managed to pick and choose from the staggering volume that makes up The Hindu photo archives. They explain that the editing process involved a combination of building tools and physically looking at the photos. “We built some software in the original stages (using open source toolkits) to detect similarities between images, and ran them on hundreds of thumbnails,” says Sukumaran. Most of the background work was done by placing combinations of search terms into NICA, the Hindu’s internal database that CAMP had been given access to.
Painted photographs
Through the editing process, Sukumaran and Anand uncovered painted photographs from the 1950s, unexpected scenes such as clothes drying on a forensic laboratory’s fence in Madurai, and images of Chennai’s relentless archivist, Roja Muthiah, at home. Inevitably there’s a bank of political imagery, cardboard cut-outs of politicians falling on crowds, being put up or being taken down. “In all this, we are riding upon the courage and labour of press photographers across India,” says Sukumaran.
What is it about this archival process that fascinates Anand and Sukumaran? It’s the experiences that can be lived through these images, spanning a century. Now, with infinite data presenting itself every day, archiving is slowly shifting from documentation to what CAMP describes as “surveillance capitalism”. But at the end of the day, it’s the way one works with the information at hand, either for personal gain or solely to create. The latter moulding time and, in the case of A Photogenetic Line , literally breaking all borders.
On show: A Photogenetic Line
At The Senate House, Chennai
From February 22 to March 24
The writer is interested in art, photography, culture and history.
@ZahraAmiruddin
