City of Photos (Nishtha Jain, 2005)The textured history of photography’s imbrication in co

City of Photos (Nishtha Jain, 2005)The textured history of photography’s imbrication in consumer culture, state initiatives, scientific interest, and commercial exploitation, and the changing meanings and uses of the apparatus (from toy to science to commercial service) show the periodic reinvention and recalibration of the technology itself, as well as its meanings. The cinema, the next chapter will contend, needs to be understood along similar lines. What postscripts may we add to this early-twentieth-century history of photography? One can reasonably surmise that the hand camera did little in overall terms to curtail the power of the photo-studio in catering to the need for vernacular and domestic photographs. Over the past decade, “cybercafes” set up with refurbished personal computers armed with web cameras, and cell phones also armed with cameras, have, in varied ways, made possible personalized practices of image production and circulation. It seems that photographic history in colonial and postcolonial India bypassed an entire stage, that of the Kodak camera and the personal snapshot, in favor of a continuation of a patronage-based culture of image production and consumption, at the center of which lies the photo-studio, from which it frog-leapt to the age of the smart phone. But such an account misses the complexity of photography’s engagement with other media. In chapter 4, I want to propose that we do pay some attention to the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century hand camera if only because the hand camera intersects both with developments in print culture and with the cinema in the genre of photojournalism. Nearer to our moment, Chris Pinney (1997) demonstrates the photographic medium’s overlap with videocassettes and local cable TV networks in 1990s India. While video became de rigueur as medium of record for important occasions such as weddings, the absence of Video Cassette Players in most houses resulted in a reliance on the local cable TV operator to air the wedding for occasional family gatherings. Only on such occasions would the videocassette, dusted off its place in a cabinet, realize its efficacy, since the video technology was not at hand. At the same time, the aesthetic of video recordings remained profoundly photographic—the video program comprised superimpositions and dissolves of hieratic poses for the video camera including photomontages of still images of the wedded couple. In such an instance of a new technological interface, people continued to rely on the local and linked expertise of the photo-studio, the videographer and the cable TV operator. As Nishtha Jain’s 2005 documentary City of Photos similarly reveals, the availability of digital cameras and new imaging software such as Photoshop reinforced the dominance of photo-studios, as studios replaced actual painted backdrops with digital ones customized for clients’ needs on the personal computer. In both McDougall’s and Jain’s documentaries, we find that it is popular cinema that provides the most enduring and popular tropes and imaginations of performing Identity for clients in photo-studios, as backdrops (painted or Photoshopped) mimic the mise-en-scène of a Hindi film song and clients dress in movie costumes and the studio cameraman accordingly obliges them. – Sudhir Mahadevan, “The 19th Century Indian Techno-Bazaar” in A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India (2015) -- source link

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