New Art Examiner
April 1984
Chicago Cultural Center

Through Indian Eyes: 19th and Early 20th Century Photography from India
by Claire Wolf Krantz

Through Indian Eyes was a fascinating and informative exhibit of vintage photographs and miniature paintings, curated by art critic and photo-historian Judith Mara Gutman. The exhibit and accompanying catalogue aims to persuade us that the camera documents the photographer’s vision, and that that vision is shaped by a highly enculturated aesthetic.

The camera was invented in the West and Indians first learned its technique and aesthetic from Westerners. The introduction of the camera to India in 1840 expanded Indian aesthetic possibilities. But the Indian photographers, in turn, modified the standard Western approach to photography.

Indian photographers derived their aesthetic from the miniature painting conventions of their time, of which 16 examples were shown. Characteristic features of this style include: compressed space with images presented on a flattened frontal plane, vivid local color, rich use of line and pattern, and a diffuse compositional format with no single focal point. The availability and demand for Western-style photographs exposed Indian photographers to a Western aesthetic, which they were able to assimilate and use in their photographs for European clients. But they also developed their own photography techniques to fin an Indian aesthetic consciousness.

Today we know that we do not only see in the ways first depicted during the Renaissance, i.e., space delineated through the use of perspective, light and shadow, and we also recognize that photographs don’t necessarily produce scientific proof of visual facts. But Gutman’s show reveals an engrossing additional truth: the camera doesn’t necessarily see in traditional Western ways either, and placed in the hands of an artist  its techniques will be developed so that the camera will see what the artist wants to show. Some Indian photographs were shown next to miniature Indian paintings to point out the similar compositional devices; others were shown next to Western photographs of similar subject matter to point out the two radically different approaches.

Besides manipulating the camera differently, the Indian photographers held drastically different attitudes toward the treatment of the [photographic surface. Instead of unobtrusively tinting it in the Western way, they used bold, opaque colors and 22 Karat gold, adding pattern and linear elements not originally found in the photograph, and making the finished product something unique to Western eyes: a painted photograph. Painted and photographic elements are united in a way that horrifies classical Western taste but looks today, to eyes more accustomed to alternative treatments of the photograph, to be unique and wonderful.

The major import of the exhibit is to illustrate how a device – the camera – once thought a scientific absolute in depicting reality, can be manipulated to embody a codified aesthetic. That even mechanical objects can be used to fulfill ideas, rather than to dictate ideas, was well documented in this exhibit of beautiful and marvelous pictures.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.