Informal dialogues
Different strokes
For Ravi Agarwal, photography has been a sustaining and meaningful activity; it is also the chosen medium to further his activism, notes Giridhar Khasnis
“This book portrays the life and labour of footloose workers in the informal compartments of the urban and rural economy in the southern parts of Gujarat,” wrote John Breman in Down and Out: Labouring under Global Capitalism, (Oxford University Press / 2000).
“The huge underbelly of the economy is the operational terrain for criminalised politics and prostituted bureaucracies, cashing-in on the richesse of wheeler-dealers. Our pictures do not aim at bringing out these features, but focus firmly on the world of work and labour, although the two sides should be seen and understood in tandem.”
The Emeritus Professor of Comparative Sociology at the Amsterdam School of Social Science Research has carried out extensive anthropological research for the last half century in India as well as elsewhere in Asia, focusing on the labouring poor.
Breman collaborated with Delhi-based Ravi Agarwal whose photographs in the book tell a million stories. An engineer by training, Agarwal is today considered to be one of the serious voices in contemporary Indian art. Using the mediums of photography, video, performance, on-site installations and public art, Agarwal explores, among others, issues of urban space, ecology, and capital.
His work has been shown in several national and international shows including Documenta XI (Kassel, Germany/ 2002), Horn Please, (Bern/ 2007); Indian Highway (2009); Generation in Transition (2011); The Eye is a Lonely Hunter, Images of Humankind, (Heidelberg/2011); After the Crash (Rome); and Flux: dystopia, utopia, heterotopia, (Gallery Espace, New Delhi). He has also co-curated a twin city public art project, Yamuna-Elbe public art outreach.
Photos of migrants
Agarwal’s recent exhibit at The Guild, Mumbai, titled ‘Of Value and Labour’, presented a series of photographs portraying the lives of tiring masses — construction workers, waste pickers, brick makers, cane workers and stone crushers among others. The pictures documented how these labourers, pushed as they were to the fringes of the society, led precarious lives and barely survived in an abusive and suffocating world.
Many of the works presented in the exhibition were produced between 1996 and 2000 for the book Down and Out. Agarwal recalls that his journey with the migrant labourers was intense when he met them at close quarters in South Gujarat. The experience, he says, left him personally transformed at many levels. “At one level was a sharing of the experience of their very quiet dignity and uprightness despite a very sparse material existence. At another, I could not but interrogate and negotiate my own position as a photographer trying to represent another, especially where I was clearly privileged in many ways.”
While being with those struggling people who barely survived on a day-to-day basis, he also saw in them an assertion of life itself. “It was a humbling experience to see how the lives of these very marginal people had a quiet but very powerful dignity, which was denied… When you deal with communities it is not just being with a process, or networking with them. It is also about self-examination.”
During the course of the long drawn ‘project’, Agarwal developed numerous relationships. “I loved being with those people, those spaces… I shared many things with them. I never smoked, but always carried a beedi packet, to be able to share it with anyone who wanted it!”
Agarwal says that working with them was indeed life-changing for him in different ways. For instance, as he prepared to take the picture of the young girl who was being loaded with heavy concrete bricks on her head, he saw a faint smile on her lips. He took the shot alright, but had to confront some difficult questions in the mind for himself: “What is happening? What am I doing? Who is this innocent girl carrying such a heavy burden on her head? How can she afford to smile despite the weight on her head?”
In another instance, he saw, from a distance, a lonely stone-cutter in a vast uninhabited piece of parched land. “It was high noon, the sun was scorching and there was not a soul anywhere around,” Agarwal reminisces. “But this man was thoroughly involved with his work and went on with his chore, pausing for nothing. It took me a while to actually find a route and reach him. And when I finally caught up with him, he just took a beedi, lit it, and smiled at me. For him, this was all life seemed to have offered.”
It is through such pictures that Agarwal poses penetrating questions to himself as well as to the viewer, while providing incisive socio-political commentary on the informal sector of India’s economy.
Personal ecology
The experience with Down and Out project was so intense that Agarwal gave up photographing people altogether for several months thereafter. Though photography is very expansive, he realised that it could also be very limiting. The idea of just documenting and looking at visuals as a way of presenting/ representing something makes him uncomfortable even today.
Always interested in the relationship between self and the world, Agarwal says that a photograph is not a document, but a transitory moment, and it is not an act outside. He has been a photographer since he was in his early teens; and photography has been a sustaining and meaningful activity for him; it is also the chosen medium to further his activism.
As one who defines his relationship with the world as a ‘personal ecology’, Agarwal asserts that all things are deeply interconnected, “with everything around us, with the struggle between our ‘individual identities’ and collective lives.”
He also feels strongly about technology and its application. “When people talk of ‘cutting edge’ today, I wonder what they are actually referring to. Is it cutting edge of form, of ideas, of technology? For me, cutting edge is not just a sexy form. It is actually about locating one’s personal self with what is happening in the world.”
Agarwal thinks that while technology was king for photography, a medium defined by it, it might have also killed the art in some ways. “The creator has turned destructor... There is disbelief. ‘Shocking’ photographs draw a first reaction that they are ‘manipulated’. We are not so sure anymore about the validity or ‘reality’ of the photograph… Photographs and images are no longer about ‘truth’, but about the ‘idea’ of truth.”
