Photograph as the medium of truth has often been in news. We live in the times when distinctions are too thin to be drawn when everything is being designed and manufactured to sell realities do not become immune to this ‘production’ process. Photographs are the witness and judge of any experience thus (mis)appropriating the temporal and situational timing of its significance. The beauty of photograph is that it reinvents and periodizes the event and has the same intensity as the of real time event triggering the response and reaction as of the same happening. It’s a mechanical process of contemporizing the past with its working/reworking of presenting the facts to the image, turning out to be the dialectical interaction of reality and truth.
There have been the famous photographs that have left an indelible mark on our consciousness, from Vietnamese Napalm Girl to Kevin Carter’s award winning Sudanese child chasing vulture away for having his food. The peculiar impression of photographic semantics is its precise and timely portrayal in the triad (agency) of ‘event, subject and object’. This intersectionality of these agents makes the ‘picture’ a riveting piece of unspooling the yarns of fiction from fact.
It is like chronicling the figments of historical wrongs and rights into the image with its access and understanding reaching up to the common man. How do photographs become so provocative and at the same time a ‘fact non de grata’ for institutions, establishments and ‘authority’.
Nations having the proverbial tendency of ‘mass control’, having the tendency to condition their subjects to forget the fleeting happenings so that new ones would be of their making. That’s why; you won’t see the same happening making echoes again in the public conversations. States always want to have the time working on their side and for that they can do anything. Photographs go beyond the horizons and dimensions of ‘statist time’ and instead freeze the distressed sigh and the unending satisfaction of the oppressor. In the current times this ‘regimentation of time’ can be seen in its de-humanised form, when the mourning time sounds like unending.
Photographs try to break these autocratic definitions of ‘hegemonic time’ and instead reels the real and existing ‘sufferings’ of their ‘photographed subjects’. They have turned out to be the radical redefining genre of siding with the ‘time-space’ continuum of happenings within any political structure. It lays bare the ‘architecture of oppression’, as Edward Snowden puts it while pixelating the truth.
In the same dialectics of ‘photograph’, Kashmir has time and again seen the fate of journalists. This ‘design’ of witch-hunting has been now internalised and normalised by using the Agambanen ‘state of exception’ and individuals considered as ‘bare citizens’ without letting them have their rights . You can shut the lens but not the eyes of the photographer.
In this Guattarian post-media age of informational convergence photographs can be utilised and internalised as the effective means of seeing the fact as it is. Just like the thesis of author is dead after the word is written, Photographers are re-incarnated after every glance at the photograph. They are often the conduits where we can deliberate upon the cause-effect dialectics of our social realities wherein, we can watch the movie, read a novel and dwell through the historical perspectives of the ‘subject’ while contemplating the photograph. The semiotics of photograph (Barthes) has a categorical importance to the event itself as the meaning and intentions are craftily frozen to their original.
Nothing spills out of the photograph, it has the egalitarian perspective of taking a shot of mostly subject ‘fuhrer’ and the object as ‘aggrieved’ and the sense of narrating the facts as they are.
With the concurrent rise of ‘image politics’ having its basis in ‘image’ both temporal and ‘indoctrinated’, we need to differentiate and read and introspect over the ‘photographs’ that differentiate between the ‘crafted image’ and ‘real image’. There are several examples of how visuality served the political cause for various political structures. Leni Riefenstahl through her stunning works “Triumph of the Will” or “Olympia”, managed to convey exquisitely how this visuality facilitated the Nazi regime turn mere propaganda into a broader mythology that was instrumental in garnering popular support for them.
The other dimension of fake and alternative facts have been thriving and growing across the world, one reason being to distract the public of real ‘photographs’ as they have the power to shape the scenario of public imagination. As events around us happen first with every click turning us to new pathways of information flow, photographs slow down the pace of these events and deconstruct the objective and subjective ‘intentions’ of both protagonists. It’s a lyrical dissection of how humans have been breaking through the unimaginable psychological and historical truths. Our visualising perception is thus interweaved not only with preceding encounters but also with the values and visual traditions that are accepted as everyday ‘happening’ by established societal norms. There are certainly power connexions involved in this triad amongst image, politics and image dialectics. The image is the most powerful device manufacturing and deriving meanings about the political events around us. Alex Danchev specialising in the dialectics of image and politics rightly remarks of its relevance “contrary to popular belief, it is given to artists, not politicians, to create a new world order.”
Photographs have the habit of ‘archiving and museuming the wrongs and rights’ , this preservation of rich past with the subsequent analogous ‘present’ has to appreciated and theorised so as to reinforce self-consciousness to this tradition of remembering our past and questioning the present. Images help us in re-feel, re-view, and re-think politics in the most fundamental manner. Images, in this way, make, unmake and remake political vocabulary. Lastly giving tributes to photographers as the authors of the cornered ‘reality’ that has the timeless and space-less effect in the discourse of both national as well as regional political landscapes.