Photos of the Day

Holding a Mirror for Viewing and Viewing Buddha by the Light of a Mirror were recently made with a Nikon Coolpix as I travelled with my taxi driver Mukesh from Bombay to our Udaipur home, via the Indian state of Maharashtra. These images were made at the archeological site of Ellora, the famous "cave temples". With no electricity or torches within the temples, people like these middle-class Indian tourists enjoy their viewing with the help of a man reflecting the sunlight via a mirror.

from "India Poems: The Photographs"

Taking a Photograph
Waswo X. Waswo
(excerpt from the book India Poems: The Photographs)

I was walking, camera in hand, down the narrow road that cuts through the warehouse district in Cochin. This area is named Mattancherry, and through it floats the aromas of cinnamon and pepper and cardamom, the spices that for centuries have been hauled from plantations in the Keralan hills. These spices made Cochin (now properly known as Kochi) the gateway between India’s Malabar Coast and the markets of the West.

When photographing, I tend to carry my Rolleiflex in a simple plastic or paper bag rather than in a slickly manufactured camera case. It’s impossible not to be perceived as a tourist in a place like India, where skin color makes a Westerner immediately recognizable. But keeping my camera in a paper bag at least helps to avoid the more nasty stereotypes of the tourist-photographer.

I remember some years ago walking through our small Goan village of Arambol and seeing a tourist woman creeping about one of the village homes. Without warning, she thrust a huge telephoto lens through an open kitchen window. Click, click, click. I guess she was thinking of “capturing” some of the locals as candidly as possible (eating? cooking? sleeping?). The sight of this woman infringing on the privacy of others so aggressively and casually sent revulsion through my entire being. What was she doing? Hunting big game? Were the people in this small village home just a quarry to be stalked, a trophy later to be mounted on the wall? It was one of those moments when I felt ashamed to be linked with this thing we call photography. We photographers “shoot” and “capture”. We may insist that we “make” a photograph, but everyone knows we really take them.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I was walking, camera in hand, down a narrow road in Mattancherry. There was a point along the road where everything came together aesthetically. The light was right, the historic buildings perfectly suited this book “India Poems” that I was already conceiving in my head, there were a number of people doing things like reading newspapers, loading handcarts, or drinking chai. I pulled the Rollei from my bag and started eyeing up various scenes, gazing downward through the magnifier that enlarges the image that appears on the camera’s ground glass. Very soon, my camera and I were noticed.

I think Indians must be the most eager people in the world to be photographed. With very few exceptions, Indians have posed for my camera with an enthusiasm that is sometimes hard to contain. In fact, a better part of my assistant’s job has been to help keep people out of the picture. Children especially seem to love jumping into a photo at just the wrong moment.

But here, on this street in Mattancherry, the work-a-day people gave me scant attention. They all had seen tourists before. They all had their own jobs to do. The man reading the newspaper glanced up briefly to register my presence, and immediately returned to the article he was engrossed in. Without asking, I made a photograph of him. He knew it. He didn’t care. He looked up and smiled at me and I gave back a wave. At the same moment a couple of young boys came up behind me and proceeded with the usual school-taught English, “What is your name? What is your country?” They wanted to take a look through my camera so I let them. The Rolleiflex is battered and a bit of an antique. Not the sort of camera that usually dangles from white tourists.

The Rolleiflex is also straightforward and honest. It’s a camera that was never designed to peep around corners or poke through windows. To make a portrait with a Rolleiflex a photographer must get close to his subject. There is no zoom lens. With a Rolleiflex a person knows that he is being observed and that a photographer is in his midst. An individual can then choose to pose for the attentions of the Rolleiflex or ignore it all together...but he or she becomes conscious of the choice.

As the children and I were busy exploring the street through a small machine whose lens put the chaos of their neighborhood into a nicely packaged square, I felt a soft tapping against my side. A man whose arm terminated abruptly near the wrist was touching the stump of it to my waist, gently trying to get my attention. He didn’t speak English, but it was obvious he wanted to be photographed. When I aimed the Rollei toward him he grinned a very happy grin and moved back to pose against some closed wooden doors.

This man, this photo, became what I call Untitled Portrait - Cochin. The photograph is untitled because there are simply no words that I could think of that would add to what the image already says. People sometimes ask, “Why did you cut off that man’s head?” Well, in actuality I made two portraits of him. The first included his head. But by this time he was no longer smiling and had assumed the tense unnaturalness so many people acquire when facing a lens. I don’t know what motivated me to move the camera downwards for the second shot and focus upon his torso and limbs. A photographer’s instinct I guess. I knew at once it was by far the better image.

This man was probably somebody’s grandfather. He had a name, a smile, a personality. If he had spoken English I might have come to know him. But except for our brief encounter he remains just another of the myriads of cripples, amputees and lepers that are encountered on the streets of India. Do any of us...tourists and middle class Indians alike...ever really bother to look at their faces? Even when we toss a few coins to the roadside beggar, the one with no legs, do we bother to register his face, his existence, in our minds? Perhaps this is why I chose to “cut off” this man’s head. It is after all something each of us does each day. We strip the poor and the deformed of their individuality, never really wanting to look them in the eye.

I don’t feel that I took this photograph. I feel the man gave it to me. But I have no idea if he would approve of it hanging on a gallery wall or being critiqued within a book. So I join the ranks of the woman who peers through kitchen windows with a long zoom lens. We photographers are a despicable bunch. We take photographs. The best of us do not show people as they wish to be seen, instead, we show people as we imagine they really are. We try to find an essence. The final image, the statement, is what counts. We long to make images that give to our viewers a new awareness, a deeper reflection, a thrilling revelation. Take and give. We also, all photographers, box up reality in neat little parcels that contain only what we wish them to contain. Those pieces of reality that don’t fit nicely our square and rectangular gift packages are simply left out.

The main thing, always, is the final creation.

Arguments on the ethics of photography can fill volumes. But you know, if I walked into a gallery and saw the most incredible and enlightening photographs I had ever seen, and realized, suddenly, these images were made by a woman sticking her lens surreptitiously through a kitchen window...

I would forgive her.

from "India Poems"

When you first come to India
you think it barbaric
to shit by squatting
like some animal
spreading shaky legs to the ground.
Your restaurant’s porcelain toilet,
flat to the floor,
seems filthy and ridiculous.
How can you straddle this thing
without stepping
in somebody else's piss?
It is no longer an easy matter
of dropping trousers
and sitting on a throne.
You must balance fully on your toes,
aim for the hole,
pull clothes out of the line of fire.
This takes practice.
At first it is easier
to completely remove your pants.
When you wash your ass
you learn
to hold the water pitcher in your right hand
spread your legs wide
and pour a cleansing stream down your bent-forward back.
The rivulets will drizzle between your cheeks
as your left hand reaches between your legs
and scrubs your butt.
The touch of your asshole
on the tips of your wet fingers
becomes familiar.
After,
you learn to lather your hands
fragrant
with soap and icy cold water.

When you first come to India
you think it barbaric
to crap by squatting,
to wipe shit away
with your own naked skin.
You look with suspicion
at Indian palms,
become sensitive to what Indian fingers touch,
question how your food is prepared
in those dark, dingy kitchens.
You make the mistake
of grabbing a man's left hand to shake,
discover it is wet and cold,
and hold
it briefly
with a shiver of disgust.

When you first come to India
you think it barbaric
to shit by squatting.
But with the march of time,
night after night,
you suddenly realize
it is natural and right.
Those ridiculous kings
on their English thrones,
reading their newspapers—
for hats they should have cones!
How can they really clean the shit away
if they only smear it with tissue
day after day?

I can’t help it.
I return to the U.S.A.
and think of dingleberries
on all those proud, moneyed,
unwashed asses.

from "India Poems"

The sugar cane field
shakes and rattles
three oxcarts
with wooden wheels.

Two women
toss chaff to the air
catching good wheat
in worn baskets.

At the rice paddy
bent workers sing,
the brown water
shines laboring ankles and wrists.

In the sky, and Indian eagle
with wings like outstretched hands,
hovers,
motionless.