(1998-2008), on view at Talwar Gallery, New Delhi

Re-member
A review of Allan De Souza’s A Decade of Photoworks (1998-2008), on view at Talwar Gallery,
New Delhi, from August 25 to October 25
By Swaati Chattopadhyay
Allan de Souza’s first exhibition in India, A Decade of Photoworks (1998-2008), has selected
photo-works from his previous series - The Lost Pictures (2004), UFO and Divine Series (2008).
Crucial to the exhibition, and de Souza’s oeuvre, is use of the word ‘photoworks’ in the title itself
- it is reflective of de Souza’s overall engagement with his chosen medium of work: the
photograph. For de Souza, the photograph is a creative medium, not because of its archetypal
notions of ‘documenting the truth’ or being a ‘neutral evidence’ of things as they are, or were. In
his works, he challenges these notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘authenticity’ associated with
photography which, he believes, are derivations of primitive and orientalist practices that are
themselves coloured by agendas that can never be neutral.
Hence de Souza’s works are photoworks - where the photograph has its own personal mythology
of veracity - it is real simply because of its ‘is-ness’. The photographs are worked upon,
juxtaposed, mirror-imaged in a very exhibitory fashion, declaring almost, the rejection of
untainted documentation. For instance, the first work one encounters on entering the gallery, is a
40 x 60 photowork based on a photograph of his mother, against a flower bush. The photograph is
saturated with colour and almost surreal in its 3D inbetween-ness. It is painterly and photographic
in an impossibly simultaneous way. This push and pull, between fiction and reality, the absurd
and the rational, familiarity and distance, is reflected in the entire series this photowork is part of:
The Lost Pictures.
Previously, de Souza had exhibited on a similar theme, a series of works titled Terrain, where he
created entire ‘realistic’ cityscapes of America with trash (empty bottles and pills) and his own
body’s debris (fingernails and ear wax). In The Lost Pictures, the autobiographical element is a
lot more apparent, in the sense that it’s not just problematising identity by locating his body in the
geography of space, but exploring space inside out: by transposing interiority onto lived space.
This, he does through the trope of memory, which is tangible and yet elusive: what you remember
affects your present, but is also tampered with through time. In that sense, by a twisted corollary,
memory is akin to photography. To explore this ironic paradox, he took photographic slides of his
family album, shot by his father, and developed them into photographic prints of 5 x 8
dimensions. These archetypical ‘frozen-moment’ photographs - with familiar images of de Souza
and his siblings on the beach or at home with their grandparent - he taped onto various surfaces in
his house, such as the kitchen counter and the bathroom floor. Over time, the prints began to wear
marks of the debris of daily life - tea spills, water marks, bodily fluids, foot imprints, pencil
shavings, hair strands, dust - settling into the photograph like a foggy layer. De Souza then
scanned these works and digitally manipulated the contrast, colour and lines, blowing up the final
work into 40 x 60 prints. These prints become visual embodiments of the idea of ‘lived
memories’ - how memories are retouched and reconstructed by the act of remembering itself,
over the passage of time. It’s also a play on photography’s alchemy: how it can ‘keep alive’ what
is dead and gone. When corporeal matter - bits of hair and body fluids, so-called alive particles layers that frozen moment, standard notions of what is dead and what is alive are questioned,
fractured. The photowork is simultaneously both, dead and alive.
The Lost Pictures is also a very strong representation of another theme of Allan de Souza’s work
- the politics of identity. Its locus is his own history. Born to Indian parents who migrated to
Nairobi, raised in colonial Kenya, London and New York, and currently living between his home
in Los Angeles and his work as professor at San Fransisco, de Souza has always been acutely
aware of how his multiple identity both fuels and fractures his perception. The Lost Pictures,
however, is poignant as well, for it was created after the death of de Souza’s mother, who began
to turn blind during her final illness. Without vision of the present moment, her memory would
often take over her thoughts and the ability to experience the world rationally. She often referred
to it as “the fog”. When de Souza was given an opportunity to visit Nairobi again, 28 years after
leaving, he photographed it with a desire to see ‘through her eyes’ as well as his own ideas of
home, ‘the way it really was’. What he discovered was that both were impossible - Nairobi was
not what he or his mother remembered, and the experience left him severely doubting his
memories themselves. To see through his mother’s eyes was doubly problematic, because not
only was he unsure of the veracity of memory, but also of subjectivity: could he ever know what
it was like to see as his mother, not like her? However, the fogginess of the works in The Lost
Pictures is not just a referral to his mother’s ‘fog’ or provoked by sentimentality, I think. It is also
playful and witty, as a lot of his work is, especially the last series UFO and Divine Series.
The fogging or clouding over also has to do with the fact that De Souza was diagnosed with
cataract in both eyes as early as the age of 35, and had to live for many years with defective
vision (I personally believe this has an impact both ironic and profound on his use of the
photographic medium, and the emphasis on preserving that which can be seen). In a very candid
essay, My Mother, My Sight, he describes the visual sensation of that experience, how his eyes
‘play(ed) tricks, switching from a double image to blurriness to relative clarity with each blink.
These constantly changing visions make it impossible to tell which are more accurate, so that I
can’t tell if what I see is in fact what I see, or if it is somehow mutated by how I remember it. I
can’t be sure, but I feel that my memory is overcompensating for my lack of perception.’ He also
spoke of how his memory became more focused as his eyesight recovered clarity, ‘a seesaw
between perception and recollection’. This theme of intense subjectivity, that has informed his
earlier work as well, is amplified in the experience of viewing The Lost Pictures: all lines are
obscure, evading definitive interpretation. The sense of loss - evoking the title, and also Eve
Oishi’s term ‘painting with an eraser’ (from her review of Allan de Souza’s work) - is very
apparent, in the way that the original photograph loses some of its identity, in order to acquire
new ones. Each work’s detail draws you closer to examine it, and yet, you must pull back to make
some sense of it in totality.
From the expansive space of the gallery where The Lost Pictures is exhibited, one moves to an
adjoining space: a smaller, more intimate space, a feeling of closing in. Here are exhibited 24
works of about 16” x 16” size, framing 3 x 5 photographs that adhere to the traditional notion of
‘frozen moment’ (although 24 is also the ‘number of frames within one second of film’, as de
Souza himself suggests, in a wonderful performance text entitled Fly Boy, in the form of a lecture
critiquing de Souza’s work, by a fictional Dr Moi Tsien who fails to show up, and the artist is
asked to step in and present it himself). The ‘postcard’ size here is ironic, it seems, for these are
all images of empty spaces in various airports: very non-touristy postcards indeed. In contrast
with very overtly personal subjectivity of The Lost Pictures (although this series was created
before The Lost Pictures), these photographs seem almost anonymous, emptied of people. Their
small size and empty spaces make them seem unreal, like miniature models, an inversion of his
earlier series Terrain, where he had photographed landscapes made with trash and body’s waste
in such a way that they looked ‘real’. There are no labels indicating the geographical location
either; such high-ceilinged steel and brick strucutres, metal lounge chairs, fluorescent lighting
could belong to an airport anywhere. These are spaces that are devoid of local character (and to a
certain extent, feeling) - a very ‘globalised’ look. These are spaces that reflect the experience of
being diasporic. Spaces that are fluid, transitory, easy passage, ostensibly without the trappings of
historical and cultural baggage. And therein echoes the title of the series: Thresholds. The series
conveys the artist’s inbetween-ness, how he totters over the threshold of belonging - he belongs to
all the places he has lived in, and yet to none of them at all. In that sense, his sense of self is truly
diasporic, which literally means ‘to scatter’. For me, the instant association was from fiction: I
was reminded of the character of Ila in Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, who remembers her
childhood through the memories of various airport restrooms.
The airport metaphor from this 1998 series is raked up again in de Souza’s 2008 series, UFO and
Divine Series. To view these two, one has to enter another gallery space altogether, which is
disconnected to the earlier gallery - a critical flaw, though the space of the gallery is mainly
functional (it is within a house in a residential colony). The unnaturally empty spaces of the
airport in Threshold seem to echo with danger in UFO. Airports are also a kind of national
symbol now, and are thus in danger of impending violence: hijacking,
attacks, accidents. They are areas of high security and surveillance,
but suspicious of photography, because it can be a means to map this
vulnerable space. Hence in UFO, we see that photographs of grids on
runways and routinous things such as cranes and air-lifts are arranged
in such a way that from a distance, the overall shape is of a missile.
It’s a statement as tongue in cheek as it is profound. Like a UFO,
photography in airport spaces is liminally dangerous and something to
feared.
De Souza uses the term ‘reconnaissance’ for this act of
photographing, and an incident that took place during the making of
this series as well as Divine Series is important in its shaping. The
first time these two series were exhibited, de Souza titled his
exhibition, “I Don’t Care What You Say, Those are not Tourist
Photos’. This was a line his fellow passenger on the aircraft told him
while he was photographing the runway; he concluded with ‘and as an
American citizen, I want you to stop taking them’. The fact that a
‘public’ space had been rendered inaccessible in the name of national
security was made more complicated by the fact that de Souza is
obviously brown-skinned. What was even more complicated than this
simple racialist equation is that the man who accused him, was not
white, but a ‘young black man, college-educated, middle-class, an
aspiring actor’. Woven into this is the idea of the ‘tourist photo’ that
evokes the postcards from Threshold; that only lived-in spaces are
worthy of photography. Temporary spaces like airports, literally, are
nothing to write home about. But for de Souza, who travels so
frequently and routinely from LA to San Francisco, this space of
passage has become the inhabited space itself; he can’t stop himself
from photographing it repeatedly, returning to it, to ‘re-know’ it.
Apart from its politics, I enjoyed viewing UFO simply for its almost psychedelic, hallucinatory
play on asymmetry. In a way it destabilizes each image because there is no one way of
understanding it, or grasping its entirety. The Divine Series has the same effect, but this time,
with a contrasting emphasis on symmetry. These are photographs taken from the aircraft while
it’s airborne, but the photographs have been juxtaposed in such a way that a cloud field seems to
have - miraculously - the same latent bearded face that another photograph of a landmass does.
Miraculous is a crucial word here, and it brings in all the issues of the ‘real’ photograph - I kept
thinking, if these two are photographs and hence ‘true’, how could two contrasting natural
phenomena create such similar patterns? It had to be a miracle of sorts (and the title rings in my
head at the precise choreographed moment). Most of the works take these very ordinary images –
pretty much like satellite imagery - and transform them into subliminal, ‘divine’ imagery.
Images are cropped and mirror-imaged, creating a fantastic density of textures and topography
(what I’d imagine an aerial view of the Lord of the Rings landscape to look like) that swirls into a
shape other than what you know it to be. So what I know is a rock interface, after mirror-imaging,
transforms into a giant face, like that of a mythological larger-than-life creature. And yet I know
that the person viewing this same work next to me may or may not see this fantastic mythological
landscape I see. In that sense, it is fascinating how de Souza uses cartography so cleverly, to map
the landscape of the mind, taking the intense subjectivity of The Lost Pictures to an extreme,
abstract level. He uses the inkblot imagery like a psychoanalyst would, and dislocates
conventional word-to-image associations, to explore the play of perception. It problematises
subjectivity, because what each viewer sees not purely a brain activity, but a product of
associations and memories, which are in turn tampered with over time. With that thought, the
exhibition comes full circle, evoking The Lost Pictures. One exits the building with the first
impulse on entering: a feeling of being in limbo, and the simultaneity of the real and the surreal.