The delightful and disturbing
The publication was birthed in connection with Drik's Chhobimela 2004 and this volume is also a homage to what Dr. Shahidul Alam has been able to achieve over the years, inspire a committed cavalry that is creative, dedicated, and resourceful. Dr. Alam is no less himself, and just as the Chhobimela is held regularly in Dhaka bringing together photographers from all over, its success is not just in the exhibitions but that Bangladesh has been able to overcome the dark shades of depression and become a celebration of light. Just like photography.
But that would be a partial explanation because what the magazine does is discuss the mind and methodology of image making through lenses, whether of the eyes or the machine, that is the camera. This magazine is a serious attempt to do away with the flippant and introduce the anthropological, social and psychological visions and representations that generate the image and the counter image that make up today's world of photos. It begins where picture taking ends and the magnifying glass of the mind behind the shutter begins. It's not about picture taking but on picture taking and this difference is the space that designates this beautiful yet disturbing volume.
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As the editorial explains, the volume expands on the developing theoretical structure of photography built around the structures of State and society. It is presenting a new image that is just being clicked now and in the immediate and the Counter Foto images are more about that narrative. It does seem therefore that the pictures are less important than the words and that itself is a counter construction that is interesting and stimulating though sometimes they do stretch beyond a point. Many of the contributors are eminent anthropologists and what gets the focus is visual anthropology and not visual arts. It's about the construction of the image and not the image itself.
That is a path breaking move because this is almost the first mature attempt to understand and formulate what images come to mean. The Fotos inside are not pleasant chats but expressionistic descriptions of what the image-maker has understood and tried to capture the world. This expressionistic categorisation is interesting because it means a particular way of looking and describing the images around us. They are not clicked moments of frozen reality but reality that is shaped into images. They have more in common with Diane Arbus with her quite horrific images which showed the highly disturbing strewn within the ordinary. The famous image of a young boy screaming in rage holding a toy grenade in Central Park, New York or hugely obese couples choking the space in a room signify something is not right with the world. They are not the "moments" of Cartier-Bresson and his classmates slicing and freezing time and truth in the sublime ordinariness. It's a transition to be sure but one that has to be noticed and in Bangladesh that news has formally arrived through this magazine and book.
Rahnuma Ahmed and Manosh Chowdhury are great craftspersons of ideas and we are enlightened by their thoughtful but difficult for the uninitiated to read for the first time, essays. Pavel Partho tries to locate "otherness" in Bengali photography while Shahidul Alam's translated piece is on the absurdities of the "pictures for poverty" business, a much more accessible piece. The last named article is a realistic description of how discrimination is practiced even in worlds which claim to serve the poor and do the opposite.
They all make up this necessary mosaic which Counter Foto wishes to present before us all. They wish to say what has to be told about the silent images and about the eloquence hidden by the startling silences of what we observe and see. They are no longer pictures, photos, and images but as Rahnuma Ahmed say vividly, a series of representations and misrepresentations.
Partho of course puts into focus this distortion and shows how the Indigenous People are being presented to the world and themselves and through this process mis(represented). One is reminded of how the Native American (Red Indians) was redesigned and what role photography played in that. So this becomes the documentation of a murder of identity. It is an excellent piece of documentation and investigation adding quality and empathy not just to a subject sometimes accused of not being so but particularly in this case the significance is greater. This is evidence of the national self and photo and artisan have become part of the evidence. The man behind could not be farther away from the subject and this distance becomes the statement that indicts our nature of cultural genocide.
A shutter on words of Anwar pixman
Yet the centerpiece if you will of the volume is the interview of photographer Anwar Hussain by Saiful Huq Omi and Munaem Waseef . It's a very neo-journalistically done but is a terrific attempt to create art out of facts. Like many photo persons Anwar has to be into self-advertisement and every interview is in a sense that. Anwar Hussain in particular has fashioned a lifetime in the world of light clicking the shutter on himself and his personal world. The images are in a way an extension of that and that gives his pictures a lack of the documentary that borders on the fictional realism. It becomes his signature and his textual explanations extend the persona. This is an excellent construction of critical collaboration that has helped reap rich dividends for the reader.
Of course the production is superb and credit must go not just to the design team and lay-out artists but the team as a whole. Care and love is evident on every page and of course a book on graphics and images could hardly be otherwise. There are several attempts to create such volumes without either the skills or the resources but in this case there is very little to complain.
Yet for a layperson it might not be easy to avoid irony for the very reason that it tries to tackle an unknown new world, its birth and growing up. In 1989, the Kodak camera and film company set up a billboard which said, "150 years ago a language was invented that everyone understood". This volume is an excellent example of how simplistically in error this statement was. What is visible is not necessarily obvious, what can be seen isn't necessarily understandable. It's this delightful irony that Counter Foto represents by turning the simple into something haunting, beautiful but never far from being strange and inexplicable either.