BENGALURU:Waswo X Waswo’s current exhibition in the city is a kind of a mini-retrospective held together conceptually by a short story that he wrote about five years ago.
“That story, “Photowallah”, is a mix of autobiography and fiction, humour and introspection,” says Waswo.It is about a character very much like Waswo, a foreigner trying to create photographs in a landscape that is many things: traditional, modern, and described by Waswo of being fraught with both colonial history and post-colonial theory.
The collection has photos from three of his different bodies of work: “A Studio in Rajasthan”, “New Myths”, and “Gauri Dancers”.
Hand-painted Photos
The images in the collection are primarily digital photographs, later hand-painted by Rajesh Soni, a third generation Rajasthani hand-colourist. “His grandfather was a court photographer for the Maharana Bhopal Singh of Mewar, and the art of hand painting black and white photographs was passed down to Rajesh through the intermediary of his father Lalit,” says the photographer and writer.
Waswo met Rajesh over ten years ago in Udaipur. “Rajesh’s skill at hand-colouring helps shift my black and white studio portraiture into a rather nebulous time, at once vintage and contemporary,” says Waswo.
In the early years of their collaboration, Waswo needed to emphasise on Rajesh that he didn’t want too heavy of colouration. “His grandfather had painted on silver gelatin photos in oil paints. We now use watercolours, which lets the actual photograph come through in a very translucent way. Rajesh has an incredible sense of the subtleties of colour,” he says.
Models Who Help on Set
Originally from Wisconsin, Waswo first visited India in 1993; after several trips in the intervening years, he finally moved to India, renting a home and building a studio in Udaipur in 2006.
Many of the people captured in the images are friends from life, says Waswo. His assistants Ganpat and Jai Prakash also help him meet and find models. “ The villagers are absolutely wonderful, and not only agree to be models, but also often end up helping us in our shoots. When people pose for a photo, we want to see them as they actually are. The idea is to take a scene I might remember from real life, and then recreate that in the studio,” he says.
When Western artists live and work in India and take subjects from the country as the focus of their work, they are quite often idolised or stigmatised. Is that true for Waswo too, one wonders. It was truer fifteen years ago, than it is now, he responds.
White Privilege at Work
“When I first started exhibiting my work in India, which was the former series called “India Poems”, I found that I was taken much more seriously as an artist here in India than I was in my home country. In the USA I didn’t have much of a reputation, but suddenly, in India, the whole nation began to talk about me,” he says.
Some of that was due to the fact that at the time very few foreigners bothered to exhibit their work in India, so Waswo says he stuck out as sort of an oddity. Some of it was probably white privilege at work, he claims.
“And then there were also the critics, people who were resentful at the attention I was receiving and who were almost venomous. But times have changed. India has prospered and become self-confident. This old dichotomy of idolise or stigmatise has broken down. It’s much easier to be accepted as just another artist these days,” he says.
Waswo claims that he doesn’t think of India as his subject. “Maybe I think of a very small part of India as the locus of my work,” he says.
“Probably most of my work is really about me… it’s a kind of extended narrative about my personal experiences. More broadly, when seen together with the miniatures that I do with R Vijay, it is a story about the foreigner in India, not India itself,” he adds.
Why Am I Excluded?
His works have been in the centrestage of the debate on role of a Westerner photographing a foreign land. He has been accused of being an orientalist and of glorifying the exotic in India. “ Exoticism is exoticism. It is the enjoyment of what is strange, new and marvelous to the observer. You don’t have to be a Westerner to appreciate the exotic, nor do you have to be in the East. I would dread to live in a world without things exotic to give us wonder,” he says.
So, has the criticims ever affected him emotionally? On some days Waswo manages to brush away all the criticism and is happily working. But on other days, he says that he finds himself thinking, “Oh, I should have been invited to participate in this show or that show”. “But in the end I just need to keep remembering how lucky I am, and how good India has been to me,” he adds.
“Photowallah” is on display at Tasveer gallery until May 27.
Stories Behind the Snaps
Feathers for Sale
We didn’t know this man personally, but he would always bike around Udaipur and sell peacock feather for use in temples and at marriage functions. He seemed to have a very dour personality, which was quite at odds with the idea of peacock feathers, which we tend to think of as fun and joyful. So when we made the photo I tried to capture a sad, wistful look, as if he were longing for a different life. I’m not sure if this was actually the case. Some things are of course the outcome of my own imagination.
The Shopkeeper
This man runs a small shop in Udaipur’s Bhrampol neighborhood. I’d often catch him looking at me and my assistants with a suspicious gaze whenever we’d pass him on the way to my godown, which happens to be near his shop. Eventually we decided to photograph him, and I wanted to catch that gaze. This photo was made back when I had the old studio that was on Ambavgarh Hill in the center of Udaipur. Ganpat and Jai loaded almost his entire shop into a three-wheel tempo, and moved it up the hill to the studio… counter, scales, money box, gutka...all of it. Luckily the man proved very friendly and helpful once we got to talking to him. Like many of our models he took the performance of his role with a great deal of earnestness and fun. He gave the camera just the right look. This photo is still one of my personal favourites.