The barrels of the lenses
CAMERAS have reduced the world to a global village. The mechanically and electronically reproduced images flowing from the barrels of their lenses are more powerful than the bullets that flowed from the barrels of Mao 's guns. Brutal or beautiful, selling or seducing, these images can generate both anger and empathy -- making the camera the chosen weapon, to create markets and arouse public concern and pressure. Visual lobbying is, today, a major tool for the world's Greens in their fight for saner attitudes towards our environment.
The landscape, as a genre in photography, is as old as photography itself. Within it lies a range of attitudes reflecting, it is said, people's changing perceptions of nature and their relationship with it. The idea of land as territory to be conquered gave photography the first topographic "views" made by exploratory surveys of the colonies. Views became picturesque visions of grandeur, in the hands of photographers who wanted to be called artistes and responded with ideas borrowed from the 19th century painters, whose Romanticism saw "landscape art" as the portrayal of a mood, as an "allegory for life". Nature, for them, was awesome, powerful and grand, and a decaying tree was only a metaphor for decaying life.
Photographers in India divide themselves into 2 categories -- pictorialists and the photojournalists. There are also artistes, who still see the landscape with the mindset of 19th century pictorialism -- picturesque and sublime scenery. Nature for them is just a visual spectacle, an aesthetic refuge. They will not see the all too obvious horrors of industrial pollution, which is not art for them but something better left to the their other brethren, the photojournalists who continue to use photography as a tool. They have yet to realise that photography has lost its communicative edge to television. Both have yet to realise that photography is today an autonomous, self-contained medium of self expression and creation, not bound by archaic rules and roles.
Nils Udo's exhibition of photographs at Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, should be an eye-opener for the Indian photographer. Udo does not fit into the traditional picture of photographer as artiste. He was a painter who gave up painting and became an "artist of nature", seeking a spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic dialogue with nature, not in the traditional terms of a landscape painter but as a conceptual artist whose work is an offshoot of the late '60s move towards a "body and land art" -- art in the form of happenings, installations and site works.
For Nils Udo, the landscape becomes a stage and an equal partner in the realisation of his works, works that are almost a ritual, a rite that succeeds in bringing back religion into contemporary Art. India Rock, India Gate and India Temple are titles which tend to look at India from an Orientalist point of view by projecting an image of an ancient and religious India. The saffron marigolds tend to echo and idolise an image of India as a land which worships both land and nature.
Meditative but political, monumental yet minimal, this work is an urgent appeal for a new understanding of the importance of nature in our lives. Nature which has equal rights in our relationship with it, and is not an idealised image or an endlessly exploited resource.