Raghu Rai Interview

A Smile from the Streets of India

Raghu Rai came to photography by accident. “I was staying with my elder brother Paul who was a photographer. We went to a village to take some pictures and when the film got developed, my brother sent one of my images to The Times in London. It was a picture of a baby donkey in the fading sunset. The picture editor there was Norman Hall, who was the editor of the BJP Annual and later editor of Photography Magazine. He saw this picture and published it half page in The Times. I was working in Civil Engineering because that was what my parents wanted me to do. It was a government job, everyone wanted a government job in India in the 1960s, but I hated it. So when this picture was published it was like a revelation to me and I thought, that’s it, I’m going to be a photographer.”

“So I became a photographer in 1965. I worked at the The Statesman in Calcutta. This was formerly a British newspaper and still had a British editor called Ivan Charlton; he had a wonderful respect for photography. I used to get lots of space: half pages and photo-features when something big happened. Then I worked for India Today from 1982-1991, which was a weekly magazine, I would get 12-14 pages for a story and I was free to choose assignments that interested me. But that was the last job I did. It’s better to be a free bird and do what I want to do.”

Throughout his career, the driving force of Rai’s work has been the energy of  Indian street photography. “A few years ago there was a French-led symposium on Street Photography held in Delhi. One of the speakers said street photography is dead. I took him on and said the purpose of street photography, or any photography, is to document the times we live in now. On the one hand this could be documenting the lives of famous people like Indira Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but for me the real purpose is to photograph the lives of ordinary people and their daily lives because that is what makes up the soul of this country.”

One of Rai’s earliest and best-know works demonstrates this affection for the ordinary Indian. It shows a street scene at Chowri Bazaar in Old Delhi. The image is criss-crossed with energy, as rickshaws, trolleys, carriages and bikes vie with horses, cows, labourers and schoolchildren for possession of the road. Down the middle of the picture, carriage tracks have left trails through what looks like frost. Bare-footed labourers push pipes down the roadway, while across the top of the picture a stream of horse-drawn carriages carry passengers to their place of work.

It is a photograph that could only have been made in India, but Rai recognizes that, “...photography is a western invention. The influences in Indian photography are people like Henri Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz and Robert Frank. They talk about capturing a space or a moment in time. India has different environments, religions and people. There is so much going on in one picture that your picture needs to take in. It has to be multi-layered to capture the complexity of India. They need not be one decisive moment, but several decisive moments. And that’s what I try to capture in my photographs. You have to remember India is not one country or one culture or one time. You look at that picture of Delhi and it could have been taken 200 years ago.”

Rai believes that not just anybody can photograph this world. “Let me tell you very honestly. India is my own world. It takes all of you mentally, physically and spiritually. Almost every photographer in the world comes to India at some point because, on the surface, India is a very easy country to photograph. But India is not something you can just walk into and understand as an outsider. I can walk around and sniff around and my photography is life itself. It’s not a style; it’s a way of being. My context and connectivity is with a larger space and a larger experience.”

So India may be easy for foreign street photographers. There will be colour, chaos and a diverse range of people and places. The photographic possibilities are endless, yet the complexity of what is in front of one’s eyes cannot be underestimated. Nothing is simple here, nothing is straightforward and everything has a meaning and significance. If you don’t understand those meanings, if you can’t read those signs, signs which are engrained into Indian ways of thinking and being, then how can you portray it? And if you don’t portray it in your pictures, if you are missing out all these vital elements, then how can your pictures or what you are attempting to communicate be trusted.

One could say that only locals can truly understand the street scenes of somewhere like New York, Paris or Tokyo. However, India is such a complex, multi-layered society that this applies more than for any other country in the world. At the same time, just as different cities have different styles of representation, so they have different ways of working; New York has the in-your-face style of Bruce Gilden or William Klein, photographers who isolate the individual and the anxiety, Tokyo the strange anonymity of Daido Moriyama or Shomei Tomatsu and Paris the romance and nostalgia of Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Brassai.  For Rai, street photography with Indian characteristics is about joining the flow and being invisible. When Rai photographs, he uses minimal equipment and is as inconspicuous as possible. He is not an outsider in the crowd; he is part of the crowd.

While street photography is Rai’s first love, he has also worked as a photojournalist covering some of India’s most traumatic events. The worst of these was undoubtedly Bhopal in 1984: a disaster where a gas leak at the US-owned Union Carbide plant killed over 8,000 people in the days after the event and many more in the years that followed.  The disaster became synonymous with corporate criminality and evasion of responsibility that continues to this day. Raghu Rai arrived in Bhopal the day after the leak and took the picture that became the symbol of the world’s worst industrial disaster. It shows a child being buried in a rough mix of soil and stone. His body is wrapped in some kind of shroud but the face is uncovered. A hand brushes his forehead in a gesture of comfort. The eyes of the child are empty, clouded over, as though burnt by the chemicals of Bhopal, his mouth open in an expression of exhaustion and fatigue. Nobody knows who he child his, his body was never claimed and for all its sadness the picture is strangely fatalistic and calm.

Rai returned to Bhopal and worked with Greenpeace, but found the tragedy too much to bear. “It’s a never-ending story because people are still dying there. I made a book and an exhibition and it did make a difference at one time but when you go into tragic situations like that, it takes a toll on you. I was there from the start and in the first three days the gas was still there in the bodies of people and animals, seeping out. Seeing so much death is terrible and going back was also painful because you see all this suffering and you truly can’t change their lives. You need healing after that.”

For Rai, healing comes with the camera. “The moment you put a camera on your eye, your focus becomes clearer and you start learning about where you come from. When I take pictures I am exploring the people around me, the streets around me, the world around me.”

One city that Rai is drawn to is the holy city of Varanasi. This is where many Hindus come to burn their dead. The holiest cremation site in Varanasi is Manikarnika Ghat. Cremation here means instant liberation from the burden of life, a release from the endless cycles of reincarnation and suffering. In recent years, Rai has started using panoramic cameras to take in the totality of experiences that make up India. In his picture of Manikarnika Ghat, a line of men stand across the image, echoing Rai’s belief that his pictures represent a ‘horizontal experience’ of India with life stretching out in all directions beyond the frame. “There is no exact story I’m telling here. The body language and expressions capture the spirit and energy of the place. My wife gets very angry when she sees this picture because of the man on the right is holding his thing. She sees this and says to me. ‘You Indian men are stupid!’”

Most of Rai’s work is in black and white, but he has also shot in colour. “Earlier we used to do all black and white, but then foreign magazines worked in colour so things began to change. Different subjects require different responses. Sometimes the colours won’t gel. They can dig a hole in the space of the picture. Black and white puts a filter on the situation. It silences the noises of the colours, because colours have an emotional and physical response. India is a very colourful country but it doesn’t work for all subjects. I couldn’t have done the work on Mother Teresa in colour. My training was in black and white, and because of that it makes more sense to me. For me the best test of colour is if it can convert to black and white, it’s a good colour picture.”

Economically, India has changed radically in the 40 years that Rai has been photographing, and this had had effects in the way India is represented domestically. “Indian Photography has changed. It is going through a turning. Now everyone has a cell phone and they take a few pictures, then they think ‘oh, that looks interesting.’ So they buy a camera and start taking pictures. The tragic thing is we all have computers so we see thousands and thousands of pictures, pictures from all over the world. For example, people see work by Lee Friedlander and they try to copy him. But when Friedlander does something it’s new. When somebody else sees Friedlander’s work and tries to do the same, they are just making an inferior copy. Very little original work gets done.”

“I am against style. If style emerges from your personal life, from your experiences and your need to photograph then I can understand it. But too often style is just copied, and then you end up with rubbish. As an example, a few years ago, a very direct, hard flash was popular and we ended up with lots of pictures of people looking startled and stupid. You need to be responsive and sensitive, to receive something and not just grab it.”

“Globalisation is happening so fast in India. There is a difference in the energy on the street so you capture these changes in your images, but this doesn’t change your photography. As I’ve mentioned, I’m not fond of style. The poet Khalil Gibran said, ‘These children are not my children or your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with you yet they belong not to you’.  I want my image to be ‘the Life’s longing for itself.’”

“If people can connect with my pictures and enjoy them that is enough for me. It’s like you are walking down the street and you smile at someone and they smile back. There is nothing given and nothing taken. It is just like a little nudge, a recognition of humanity and life. That is what photography means to me. It is my profession, it is my religion, it is my karma, it is my life.”

END

A Short Interview with Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery

A short interview with Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery

When we started Hamiltons in 1984, we decided that to have a fighting chance of getting noticed we needed some heavyweights like Norman Parkinson, David Bailey and Don McCullin. Later we got Robert Maplethorpe and Irving Penn. When we started, late 20th century photography wasn’t collectable. It was early 20th century photographers like Man Ray, Edward Steichen , Stieglitz, Weston and Atget who were selling.

We need to keep an eye on young, developing artists. Often they come to me or are brought to me. They send in their portfolio or a link, but to be honest, the bigger the name of the photographer, the more likely we are going to go for them.

If you’re dealing with someone of Penn’s stature, the price and editioning is done for you. We don’t decide. In the case of a younger photographer, I would have a great hand in the pricing of a work. One needs to know what is going on in the auction world, you need to place the artist in comparable company in terms of price. The big danger is pricing them out of the market, because there is nothing worse than having a show where nothing sells and there’s nothing better than a sellout show. As a golden rule of thumb, if you’re not sure of a price, put it on the low side – because you can always put a price up, but lowering a price always looks really bad.

When I first met Robert Mapplethorpe I was relatively new to the business. I was so excited by being in his presence, I didn’t think of asking the price of his prints. Then I found out they were going for US $1,500. This was in 1987 when our other most expensive prints were US $1,000. I thought I was going to have trouble selling them, but they flew out of the door. It was a turning point because if you have the opportunity to work with a truly international superstar it brings a new market with new collectors and a new inspiration.

We have a solid group of regular collectors. But for me a real collector is almost obsessive – collecting is like a sickness where somebody simply has to have a picture. They have nowhere to put it, but they have to have it. Many people today are not collectors, they are decorators. They have a room with wall space and they need something to fill that space, something that will go with the rest of the room.

Photography is very accessible. We must be aware of how photography has informed our generation. We are all, in some way, visually literate – so there is a less of a barrier between a photograph and, for example, a pickled shark. In the next 50 years, tastes will change. Look at how photography has changed in the last 10 years – now traditional film photography looks backward. So today’s photography has made yesterday’s more valuable. In the same way, the photography of the future will make today's photography more valuable.

A Short Interview with Michael Diemar of Diemar and Noble

A Short Interview with Michael Diemar of Diemar and Noble

I opened Diemar and Noble on May 6th 2009 with Laura Noble. We had both been interested in the whole canon of photography as a historical medium, Laura from working in books at The Photographers’ Gallery and myself from collecting, and we felt that there was so much contemporary photography which was too difficult for most galleries to show. Three of our early shows were by Jennie Gunhammar, Maeve Berry and Jonathan Olley and they dealt with illness, death and violence. It was difficult work for some people, but it is work we believe in. The interesting thing is we are connecting with museums and collectors and developing the careers of our photographers through exposure to a wider audience.

When I first became aware of the Castles of Ulster I thought this was one of the great post-war projects. We phoned Jonathan Olley up and asked him to have a show with us and he said yes – nobody had ever done this to him before. Sometimes we contact people, but Laura and I go to university shows, portfolio reviews and art fairs.

On a daily basis we get 3 or 4 calls for representation. But you really have to believe in something to represent it and really feel something is first rate – so it’s difficult because we are constantly saying no to people. It’s not always the immediate commercial element that appeals – we are willing to work at being proactive at getting work in exhibitions or in books (Laura has a lot of experience in publishing). We get together with a photographer we believe in and say how we can build on their work, what we can do next to help them progress.

We show people from the 19th century to the present day, and once people understand what we have brought in from the history of photography, that signals the quality of the contemporary work we have chosen.

With regard to pricing and editioning, it depends on where people come from. If the photographers come from a fine art tradition, like Emily Allchurch and Lisa Holden, low editions of 3 are the thing. For documentary photographers, the edition is more likely to be between 10 and 15. We need to compare the prices to the rest of the market, to see where other comparable work is selling and how much it is selling for. We do have a policy of pricing to sell.

My background is a collector. I started buying Mapplethorpe, the first picture I bought was a Mapplethorpe flower, and gradually I worked myself backwards in time until I was buying 19th century Gustave Le Gray prints. You need a background either as a collector or working in an auction house to have a gallery that deals with the whole of the history of photography. You need a real feel for the photograph as an object.

We get experienced collectors and if you are a collector, you buy no matter what. During the recession of the early 1990s, everything in the art market collapsed except for photography. That was because there was that hard core of collectors. It is the same now. There are changes because from being a strange collecting thing, photography suddenly became a hot medium and as a result, the vintage became scarcer and colour photography came in. When the present recession hit, those who would just drop into a gallery and drop a hideous amount of money have disappeared. The others who have disappeared are lower-end buyers in the £250-£500 market. Work priced at that level is more difficult to sell than it was. But if you think something is good, you stick with it and eventually it will sell either for the name or what the picture is about.

I’m not that keen on running what’s been done before, with running greatest hits shows. So for the George Rodger show I worked with his widow, had access to his papers and diaries and showed new work in a way that showed more than just a greatest hits show.

We have an upcoming show by Lisa Holden. She was adopted as a child, she worked in performance and her work is grounded in these two things and her feelings of alienation. So there is a personal investment in the image-making. It’s not just about getting an idea and photographing it. It’s about being part of the idea and feeling it – and making something people can believe in.

A Short Interview with Ben Burdett of Atlas Gallery

A Short Interview with Ben Burdett of Atlas Gallery

I came into photography from antiquarian books 20 years ago – books was where the photography market lived 20 years ago because in the seventies and eighties the market was for 19th century photographs and focused on books and albums. Originally, Atlas dealt in rare books but then about 12 years ago we moved exclusively into photography

We go after people whose work we like – at Atlas we have a relatively consensual way of choosing exhibitions. Some of the artists we show I have directly approached and offered a show to, some approach us or sometimes estates of archives will approach us with bodies of work. Increasingly we are showing more contemporary work from both young and older unrepresented photographers. There are a lot of really talented photographers out there who have no platform.

We do buy work at auctions and in the secondary market – but it’s different because you know exactly what you are buying and how it is going to sell. If you are promoting a photographer as a name, you have to work at getting exhibitions and promoting his career.

We get 20 emails and 5 or 6 envelopes a week. A lot of collectors now are going to degree shows and just buying work directly from students who are in the very early stages of their careers.

I prefer low editions of under 10 depending on what it is and how much work goes into it. For a new photographer you can’t be too self-important and make very small editions with prices too high because people are going to say “Who are you?” and not buy the work. You want photographers to be seen to sell – and if they do sell, you can always put their prices up. Nothing locks a photographer in as much as having a particular price and edition that doesn’t sell. At the same time, there are very successful photographers who do really high editions, but they are the exception rather than the rule. We sell to collectors, corporate collections, museums, photographers, we sell to people who fall for individual images, especially well known images people recognize; they sell most easily because when people see them, they know and love them already. The decision has already been made. They don’t have to learn to like them.

The market has changed. There are far fewer casual buys from people wandering in and buying something because they like it and they have a huge amount of money they have just made from some deal. The people we are buying for and selling to seem to be buying more though . The serious buyers are buying more, partly because it’s a good time to be buying and there are some good deals around.

We have some fairly serious and committed buyers and collectors building a collection with a particular theme or period. That’s the interesting thing about photography; you have a vast time span of years so we sell work from early 19th century to contemporary which is different to most fine art galleries.

A Short Interview with Gemma Barnett of The Photographers Gallery Print Sales

A Short Interview with Gemma Barnett of The Photographers Gallery Print Sales



We represent 47 photographers. When I arrived in 2008 we had 77 so it’s slowly reducing. They are split down the middle with half doing black and white work – people like Lartique, Bravo, Bert Hardy and Wolf Suschitsky – and the other half doing contemporary work. Simon Roberts is our best seller. People are buying equally in both traditions but we have a stronger contemporary stock and seem to sell a lot of landscapes.

Before I arrived we were still accepting submissions and it was crazy – we still have a bag behind the door filled with CDs that have been sent in. Now all the curators go to art fairs, graduation shows, we look at our own graduate show, and we go to the MA shows at places like the RCA and LCC - it's very London-centric. I do go to portfolio reviews but it’s difficult to take people on that basis because there is no history of work and I want to know that before I can look after photographers.

Pricing and editioning is done on instinct but the photographers have a lot of say. Jacob Holdt insisted on selling his prints uneditioned. I have to test the market so we start low. Putting prices up too high can put people off. We have sold a lot of Nicholas Huges prints which start at around £300 and he wants to put the price up, but I don’t think they would sell any higher. Edgar Martins recently raised the prices of his prints to £5,000, which is fine except that I haven’t sold a print since doing so. If work is from the art world (as opposed to the photography world), there is a sense that it can command higher prices. So for Indre Serpytyte who has exhibited at Yossi Milo in New York and produces more conceptual work, the prices can be higher.

I am under the impression that the smaller the edition the better – if the edition is 30, it’s too big. I’m trying to encourage people to limit the number in an edition. Steven Vaughan sells well at the gallery and he does five images in 3 sizes – which is not too many.

We have a unique audience here. We have ½ million visitors a year but only 15-20% come to print sales. Often our clients are first time buyers, often couples who have their first home and want some decorative art for the walls and are buying a photograph for the first time. We also have established buyers and I focus most of my attention on corporate sales – where people like Sebastiao Salgado and Guy Tillim have sold very well recently.

If could start again, I would be tempted to sell on personality alone. There are some big egos out there, and it can be a thankless task - no matter how many pictures you sell for somebody, you don’t get a word of thanks. But then you get people like Wolfgang Suschitzky. He’s 95 years old, he never complains, he comes to every opening and he always has a smile on his face. He’s wonderful!

Tony Fouhse: Are you looking for a subject?

 

A short question and answer with Tony Fouhse who is making the very interesting User pictures.

Why did you start the User project?

I was looking to shoot a project, meeting strangers, setting them up into little scenarios and photographing the results. I wanted to shoot this at dusk.

I went to a bunch of spots trying to make this work.  Mostly the people I met didn't have the time (or inclination) to participate.  In desperation I went to the corner of Cumberland and Murray Streets in Ottawa, where I know crack addicts were always hanging around. In order to do what I do, it's important that the people I shoot have some time on their hands in order to collaborate with me on the shoot.

I was initially met with a certain amount of suspicion (of course) and nothing really happened.  I was loading my gear back into the car, to try another spot, when an addict named Archie walked by.  He saw the camera and asked me (and this is a quote): "Are you looking for a subject?"

I replied: "Dude, that's exactly what I'm looking for".

He let me take his picture, and after that I shot 2 more setups using different addicts.

If I'd have left a minute earlier, or if Archie had come by a minute later the project would never have happened.

When I saw the results I knew right away that this was what I had been looking for.

A few days later I took prints back to give to the people I'd shot.  Other addicts saw the prints and liked them and my approach.

I've been shooting there for going on 4 years with the support and collaboration of the subjects.

What do you hope to achieve with the project?

I say, and I'm sticking by it.....all I'm trying to do is take interesting photographs.  I'm a photographer, not a social worker.

I'm just trying to take interesting photos.  But I'm also aware of, and have studied, the vibe on the corner and the history of photography.  I try to combine all of those things, along with my own aesthetic predilections, when I'm shooting.

Can photography/your work change the way we see people?

I'm kind of cynical when it comes to this.  But I'm constantly astounded/surprised by the reactions to USER, by what the people who view these images tell me about how their perceptions of addicts have been changed.

What do your subjects think of the pictures you make of them?

 I shoot business leaders, politicians and all kinds of "regular" folks for a living but  I've never met a group of people who bring more to the table during a shoot than the addicts I work with on that corner.  If you stood behind me as I was working there you would see them arranging their expressions and their posture.  You can see them thinking about how they want to portray themselves and their lives.  They are using the opportunity to show the "outside" world aspects of their fact that they think are important to see.

Donald Weber's Interrogations

 Petty Thief

 Delinquent and Shop Lifter

 Prostitute and Drug Dealer

A few years ago I taught a group of Russians from Moscow. It didn't matter what their politics were, whether they loved Putin or hated him, whether they thought Estonia should be bombed into the stone-age or not; they were all unanimous on one thing - head 50 miles outside of Moscow and you were in a different country where things would only get worse, where alcohol was the only refuge and where hope had deigned to tread since the invention of fire.

I think of their descriptions when I see the pictures of Donald Weber - all rough and bleak, a kind of Winterreise without the lyrical edge, they have the sentiments of what I imagine a Siberian in October must feel with the winter ahead.

Weber's latest series is Interrogations (in the current issue of the BJP). It's portraits of petty criminals confessing in police interrogation rooms - where they don't have the good cop, bad cop routine but the "bad cop, really bad cop" routine. Interrogations is special, a case of the photographer distancing himself from the subjects at hand, and having difficulty doing so. Maybe the project raises questions of complicity - on the part of us, the viewers, Weber and the police and subjects themselves. So with that in mind, I put a few questions to Donald which he was kind enough to answer.

How did you gain access to the interrogation room?

I've known the major of the deparment for five years now. We've worked together since I first started travelling there. Always knew it was a project I wanted to photograph, but also knew it was one of the most difficult places to see, this is about as close as you can get in the police procedure.

What were you photographing? When did you choose to photograph?

Solzhenitsyn talked about the moment of recognition, he always wondered during his execution what he would look at, would he look up at the sky and look for a bird, or would he look down at the ground, head bowed? It's about a moment of recognition, once that flicker of acceptance occurs, things undoubtedly change. So I was looking for these moments, that passage from knowing what was once will never be again.

 You have mentioned the "moral communion" you had with your subjects? What was that "moral communion"? Did you ever intervene in the process, were you ever referred to or spoken to in the process?

The process was about a four month struggle to become completely disengaged from all sides - from me as the photographer in the room, from the interrogators to the interrogated. At first I rarely photographed, I discovered the police were actually holding back and behaving themselves; I thought for sure they'd be extra violent. I didn't want to see either of this, but the process itself. I have a very high level of patience, I would just sit there from 9am in the morning to the evening, and just wait. I went days without actually taking pictures. It's a game of chicken, and I always flinch last. In time, the police would just give up on trying to "perform" and just go about their jobs, which allowed me to do mine. It took a few months, but we got it. I saw some very terrible things and was quite disturbed by the whole process, still am, but I believe I am not a judge of their crimes nor of the methods. I am not there to intervene in the process, that would be a betrayal of my years of trust built up with the police. The work formed in this manner because I was not interested in the physical violence, but the psychological violence that we as humans seem to have a special affinity for. 

You said you found the process "morally repugnant"? In what ways? How do you reconcile that with the project?

Well watching the methods was not pleasant. Humiliation, violence, degradation. How could you not be repulsed? But the reasons I was there were not for judging them, but was to actually show something very special in the terms of the secrecy of the act. I made a special document precisely because it was about the 'absence of the void,' that it showed humans at their most vulnerable and most cruel. This series could easily be judged along the same lines as a war photographer that constantly gets criticized for not doing anything, for not jumping into the fray. What I saw was a process; we may not enjoy or agree with this process, but it's a process that has a very long history in humanity - confession.

Do you think your documentation made you complicit in the interrogations?

Not at all. In fact the person who is complicit in the interrogations is you, the viewer, and that was the point.