News photography is often lost in the churn of daily news cycle, but some images outlive the moment to become a nation’s visual memory. One such image is Virendra Singh’s photograph of a cop carrying the head of a man blown off in the September 1996 Khalistani attack in Delhi. In All in a Flash: News Photography in India, which traces 150 years of Indian photography, senior journalist Binoo K John compares it to Caravaggio’s David and Goliath because the image “told a similar but real story”, exploring the theme of “the dead and dying.”
Divided into five parts, the coffee-table book brings together reflections from a range of photographers, and is the result of “a decade of planning and four decades of reading about photography.” It moves from the freedom struggle to the Covid-19 pandemic, taking in political tragedies, corridors of power, the Taj Mahal, photographs of “savage beauty” and women. From Raghu Rai’s haunting images of the Bhopal gas tragedy and Praveen Jain’s unsettling documentation of Muslim men being rounded up by police during riots near Meerut, to photographs of Indira Gandhi surrounded by photographers, including Homai Vyarawalla, Nemai Ghosh’s images of Satyajit Ray and Qamar Sibtain’s photographs from the pandemic, each photo “assumes a life of its own”, becoming “an easy route to immortality.”
What makes the book particularly compelling are John’s reflections on the images and the photographers behind them. His writing moves between his own observations and the ideas of Susan Sontag, John Berger, John Falconer, Salman Rushdie and Shehan Karunatilaka, among others. His admiration for news photographers is evident in his attention to the labour, instinct, and sometimes sheer chance involved in clicking an image. Alongside celebrated names, the book also makes space for photographs “taken by mostly unsung photographers who roam the capital’s streets and corridors of power.” They are, as the book reveals, ‘the silent storytellers’ whose images often outlive the news stories they were made to record.