Mahesh
Shantaram is an independent photographer based in Bangalore, India. Working
with personal and subjective documentary photo series to study complex systems,
societies, and institutions, particularly with reference to contemporary India,
Mahesh tells stories that leave you with food for thought. Here is his story in
his own words.
The formative years
One of the defining
experiences of my child hood is that I grew up in Kuwait for the first thirteen
years of my life. We had to leave suddenly because of the war. When I see
scenes of refugees and all that, it is an experience I was just old enough to
remember as we were refugees, evacuees of war. It was not as traumatic an
experience as you see right now. We didn’t have to take a dinghy and travel
through the sea. It was very well organized. I think India does not really have
an experience of these real wars as such. That was part of my experience and
that was how I started my life in India. It started very suddenly and was not a
smooth transition. It was not very easy a childhood, growing up like that, when
you are asked to adjust to a totally different environment suddenly. I started
my life in India in the eighth standard, finished my college in Bangalore,
worked for three years or so in Bombay, and moved to Washington DC for a couple
of years, studied photography in Paris, and moved to Bangalore in 2006, and
have been a photographer since then.
I think I always had
an affinity for the visual. Even as a child, I used to make comic books,
cutting out pictures from magazines and paste them into my scrap book and make
stories out of it. In some way, what I am doing today is very much what I did
when I was eight.
On personal and subjective documentary
photography
That one statement
itself comes after ten years of reflection on what I do. When I started
photography, I was not really keen on doing photography as a professional
normally does – which is, having a client who dictates the shots they want.
That model didn’t appeal to me at all. Of course, one has to do that now and
then to earn. But what I was interested in was personal and subjective
documentary photography. I didn’t know it was called that, but discovered
artists who were doing it, so I sought them out. That way of being a
photographer appealed to me a lot. You make yourself an integral part of the
whole event, or ethos you are documenting. You are a part of it. If you are
doing a story on the environment, how can you not be a part of it? If you are
doing a story on drug crimes, you can’t be a neutral observer. I don’t believe
in objective photography. Whoever you are, you can’t be neutrally observant.
You can’t be in a war and be neutral. You are a part of the problem, the system
and the society you want to document. So, when it comes to working on this
year-long obsession with Africans, I tried to become part of the whole thing. I
am not just a photographer. I am not about “you do this for me and I’ll capture
you from behind the camera.” I completely get involved with what I am doing and
whom I am working with.
The challenge in this
is that people are not quite used to this form of photography, so you can’t go
to a magazine and sell it because they may not be able to use it. It doesn’t
find much commercial use. It takes years and years and years to get done. If
you have to understand anything at all in this world, everything is complex –
so it will take years. I work in long-term projects. Anything I do of any value
is long-term and I speak in terms of years. Some of my favourite photographers
are like that, working for ten or fifteen years on a project. That requires a lot of determination and
motivation, and the fact that you can’t just lose interest halfway. You need to
pursue and be persistent. You are the only one driving your own car. It is not
like working on an assignment with a specific shot list that you are getting
paid for. I’ve done many of those – but they don’t have much to take note. What
I talk about is what I’ve invested in with blood, sweat, toil and emotions.
That may not always find a commercial audience.
The African Portraits
This started like most
of my projects without me realizing that there was a project. You will remember
the attack on the Tanzanian woman last year, and you will remember how you felt
at that moment. It was the Nirbhaya moment for Africans in India. We all
remember where we were and what we were doing at that moment. It was a
disturbing moment to say the least. Life rarely presents us with an opportunity
to do something about something that we read in the news. That incident
happened on January 31, at night. It made the news on February 3 or 4. It took
three days to make the news. There was intense debate and soul searching, and
then on February 9, if you remember, India moved onto something else completely
different – the JNU sedition case. We got caught up with that. What happened to
that? What was the resolution? I was not satisfied with what we did – we just
moved on, but did the people themselves move on?
Around February 12, I went to
the area where Africans live in Bangalore – it is a place called Soladevanahalli.
No one had heard of this place, when I asked around. It is that far. I took my
bike and went there, and talked to random people. I asked journalist friends
for an introduction. One thing led to another. The people I talked to that day
are my friends now. That’s what I mean by personal involvement. If I was a
journalist working for a newspaper and had to do a story when it was a hot
issue, I would go there, spend an hour, talk to people, get a sound-byte, get
my piece filed and be done with it. As a photographer, though, that limitation
doesn’t apply for me. I can go back there again and again, which is what I did
– I went back five times over ten days. I met the same people, and even today,
I can go back there, call them and meet them. I am not manufacturing this bond
or closeness. It does exist – and grows organically.
Many found their own
ways to engage with it. On the first level, whenever there is an attack on
Africans in India, which has happened with surprising regularity in the last
year, the media feels the need to reference my work. But I think it’s like the
media trying to find a way to show that it is participating in this discussion
and is furthering it, and so they use work that already exists. So with that,
my work has been featured across many newspapers, some of which have also
stolen my work. My gallery contacted me and said that they wanted to run it as
a five-city exhibition. That’s another way of engaging with the work. People
coming in to see the portraits gives them a chance to talk about the project
and what we can do about the issue. The project has also been written about by
art critics and analysts, who have referenced the work in their writing.
Most
importantly, Africans have also engaged with the work when they feel like – the
fact that an Indian is doing something to highlight stories that need to be
told. It’s not like Africans are being beaten up and so they must raise their
voice. They are here in India as students, coming here with the purpose of
finishing their studies, and then get on with their lives. They are not here to
become freedom fighters or rebels. The story is not about Africans, it is
really about our racism as Indians. That is what I want to highlight. Since
this debate is so raw and new, we have politicians denying that there is racism
in India, and they use vicious arguments against it, this work has been
important in keeping the debate alive. It is just one of the many efforts -
there are documentary filmmakers and writers working on films and books.
Portraying Identity
When you make a
portrait, you point a camera at a human being. It is the act of seeing. The
moment you look at a person, all these questions kick in, in your mind, all of
which center around identity – the who, what, where, when and why. If I point a
camera at a person from Nigeria, and make a portrait of them, we ask ourselves
why this person is important enough to be portrayed, and what his story is.
Photography and identity are so closely related in the field of portraiture.
Each portrait has a
story behind it. Nothing is in isolation or just a whimsical “I-want-to-take-your-picture.”
I meet them and ask them questions and listen to them. I once met a trans woman
who had escaped her homophobic country, there are many in Africa, to come to
India ostensibly to study, because it was suffocating there. He came to India
and discovered he was a she, and came out and transitioned. It was the first
time in my life I was meeting a trans person. I met her in a mall in Jalandhar,
and she spoke to me for four hours. It was draining.
But she was a great story
teller and I listened in rapt attention. She didn’t finish the story, so I met
her the next day for two hours. It was the most amazing story – she had
contemplated suicide twelve times. I photographed her in front of
the boys’ hostel where she wanted to jump off from the top floor. Her father
never accepted her transition. When he enrolled her in university, he enrolled
her in the boy’s college. Her ID card shows she is a boy. It is one thing to
read about transgender issues in magazines and another to listen to a story. I
celebrated my last birthday photographing her at midnight.
