City of Photos New
English, Bengali and Hindi with subtitles, 60 min, 2005,
Directed by Nishtha Jain
Produced by Raintree Films with support from India Foundation for the Arts and Jan Vrijman Fund

- Arshia Sattar

Nishtha Jain's somber and sweet meditation on the meanings of being photographed is beautifully shot and wonderfully layered with sound. Searching the cities of Kolkata and Ahmedabad primarily, she engages with studios, with photos and with people that want to be photographed. And behind these multiple narratives that coincide and then disconnect from each other are the magnificently fantastical studio back drops that create the dreams and illusions that inform and complete the photo itself. The cities themselves are backdrops too, providing the landscape that the studio photo obliterates as well as the background for the stories that the film chooses to tell. Like other great cities, Kolkata has a single identifiable image that acts as a metonym: the old Howrah Bridge signifies everything from urban decay to Satyajit Ray. Ahmedabad does not have a similar iconic image of itself, though for many of us now, it stands for an unconscionable moment in history.

There are many strands in the film: the fact of studio photography and the men that run studios, photo artists who create palimpsests upon photographs, the need to be photographed and record oneself and ones loved ones for posterity, the vanities that go into the presentation of oneself, the photo as document of unbearable horror and the photo as fulfillment of a dream that may never come true.

Most of us of a certain generation will have some memory of being taken to a studio to be photographed. Certainly, we will have older family pictures taken in studios. Perhaps we were too sophisticated, or too shy, to choose complex fantasies as backdrops and chose the simpler table, chair, flower vase scenario. But now, apart from the ubiquitous Taj Mahal (which has recently made a ghostly appearance in the increasingly game-park-like city called Dubai), one can be photographed against the planes crashing into the World Trade Centre or the Orissa cyclone or a massive rail disaster. The point Jain is making is that studio photographs and now, digital manipulation of photos, allow us to escape precisely the reality that photography purports to contain. In contrast to these fantasies and illusions, there are the moments when we want photos to tell the truth: sadly, these are terrible truths rather than glorious moments that we would like to remember, of damage in communal riots so that victims can be compensated by reluctant authorities, of skeletal humans that have “lived” through a famine.

Photographs of people, however old or new, exert a particular fascination because they freeze a moment in what has to be a longer narrative, a story that is unfolding somewhere far beyond the reaches of the photo itself. Jain reads this to suggest that the photography is an act of mourning, capturing, in essence, moments that have died. She uses that contemplative trajectory to touch upon artists who recreate pictures of people that have died without being photographed. The dead are lovingly recreated as they might have been in life by strangers, artists who never saw them but listen to others recollections and animate the eyes of those whose eyes have long closed.

Jain lets us watch studio photographers at work along with their assistants (so brilliantly immortalized in the current television commercial for Happy Dent chewing gum). Master and assistant together transform the young men and women who come in to look their best as they pose for an important photo – one that might find them a mate, a job, a visa, a moment's immortality. The studio men suggest poses, re-do hair and make up and hold out hope, more than anything else. The film also lets us hear from a young woman and her mother who are obsessed with being photographed, even though newly formulated conservative Islam holds photographs themselves to be sinful.

The film is lyrical, thoughtful and thought-provoking. There is a synergy here between the visuals, the commentary and the suggestive sound track that is rare in documentary. Jain manages the irony of using the moving image to capture the image that is already still with equanimity and a certain grace, treating the viewer almost as a photographic plate upon which her impressions are recorded.

For more information, contact: raintreefilms@gmail.com