Domestic photography

Gargi Gupta checks out an electrifying exhibition of photographs by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil - after a full season of interesting family albums.

A middle-aged man with a flowing white beard stands tall, lit by the dappled light coming in from, presumably, windows outside the frame. He stands naked but for the langot that gives him the aspect of a yogi, one of his hands raised to the back of his head, the other held loosely by the side.

The handwritten caption below says, "Photo taken on 11th August 1930, the 15th day of fast "" USG". This is the viewer's first electrifying glimpse of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, a "retrospective" of whose photographs taken between 1889 and 1949, is currently on show at the Delhi NGMA.

There are two kinds of photographs here: self-portraits and shots of his family (most notably, his eldest daughter Amrita), in various posed, staged and (very rarely) spontaneous arrangements.

Curated by Devika Daulet-Singh and his artist grandson Vivan Sundaram (who has been using Umrao's oeuvre as the primary material for his own artistic purposes for 12 years now), there seems clearly here to be a project to imbue glory in retrospect, even to claim some recognition for Umrao as "one of the 'invisible' pioneers of modern Indian photography", as Sundaram reiterates in the foreword to this book on the exhibition.

And indeed, Umrao is very interesting. There is his technical finesse, apparent in every one of the vintage prints and autochromes; his eye for mood, character, composition; and last (and the most important), his endless role-playing in front of the camera.

"Had his work been in the public domain earlier," says Dayanita Singh, "the state of our photo practice would have been different, as would the reading of photography from this region."

So, perhaps, it is only fitting that India and the world (the show was a part of Rencontres d'Arles 2007) wake up to the work of this amateur artist who, it appears, only ever took photographs for himself and these too, in his immediate domestic surroundings.

But then January has been the season of domestic photography, of interested progeny going back to photo albums of their interesting forebears.

Co-terminously, the Gallerie Romain Roland hosted a unique mother-daughter show: Dayanita Singh's Sent a Letter and Nony Singh's photographs, again of her family and friends, between 1948 and 1980. Nony's work is, to all intents and purposes, a family album and she seems to have little of Umrao's artistic or technical self-consciousness.

"Most of all, I've photographed my first born, Nixi, amazed at the wonder of having created a life...," she says in her foreword. "Whenever I see something beautiful, something that affects me personally, I want to capture it."

So there's little Nixie lying on the chaise longue of the first five-star hotel her mother ever stayed in, crawling bald headed in the grass after her mother had shaved her, dressed as a nun, a Maharashtrian fisherwoman, and later, in a bustier that her father had absolutely forbidden her to wear....

In similar vein was Radhika Singh's "installation" at the India Habitat Centre, early January, Through Dad's Eyes. This time it is the father, Swaranjit Singh (one of the founders of Escorts), who lovingly captures images of his wife Prem, through their courtship, marriage, and three children.

"It was a love affair," says Radhika, and she portrayed it as one, printing large images on chiffon dupattas, arranging their cards to each other in a trunk, and in photo albums lined with the red satin sari her mother loved to wear.

"The exhibition is a tribute to the elegance of a way of life that has disappeared," says Radhika. This note of elegy, a sense of regret for a gentler way of life, is a standard response to all three shows.

Also a sense of recognition, since most of us have photographs by similarly camera-obsessed ancestors, which play out their own stories of love and loss. Would they be similarly worth public display? You never know, but these domestic photographs are definitely valuable research material.