It is time to look at the Pakistani photographers work anew, to retell the story of their journey. For some, the goal is to meet their peers, some of them friends, who they have never met before, seeking in them, as if in their own reflection, answers to their questions and doubts about the responsibility they all share as witnesses to history.
Anybody who visits this show thinking that it’s about the masters of contemporary photography might be sorely disappointed. It is not a catalogue; no hierarchy is established within these walls. I made the acquaintance of people who were prepared to reveal a part of themselves. Of course, I made a considered selection, but the encounters were like a photograph – in order for them to take place, they all had to come together at the same moment on the same road. I had no interest in celebrity; I set out on a journey to initiate a dialogue in which the photographers would speak to each other through their images, and share their vision with the public.
I have eschewed hierarchy because, in photography, it does not exist. What does exist is a deep mutual respect. No photographer is greater than another, no genre nobler than the next. Throughout this exhibition, the photographers respond to one another according to a kind of rhythm. There is a little jostling, but they never get in each other’s way. Nobody takes a lead. They’re merely different. Or similar. In the eyes of history, photographing a war is no more honorable than taking artistic photographs. The responsibility is the same, only the personal commitment varies.
The photographers’ nobility isn’t measured by the risks they take, but by the constancy of their integrity. Every one of them has his own story, his own reasons for having chosen his path through life. For some, the decision to pursue this path was almost inevitable. Their lives are one with their photography. I am thinking of Arif Mehmood who does not lay claim to a greater legitimacy than his peers. He remains humble, in spite of the difficulties he may have endured. That is the source of his work’s power. Shehzad Noorani is informed by the same sense of fatalism when he photographs his native country, which is full of beauty and suffering. Ayesha Vellani’s empathy; Lukas Werth’s purifying vision; Malcolm Hutcheson’s compassion; Ali Mehdi Zaidi’s provocation – some photographs are a kind of necessity for their authors. Some don’t have a choice – those images are their salvation. And all these photographers reveal themselves in the representation of the world they offer to themselves and to us. Their perspectives are filtered through the prism of their very essence. I think of Zaheer Chaudhry’s naturalism; Aysha Bilal’s humanism; Stephan Andrew’s cynicism; Hameed Moinuddin’s vagabondage; William Dalrymple’s eternal time.
For all their diversity, their views converge. They turn their gaze on the world and scrutinize it, fragment by fragment. Between them, they have created a single photograph. Ineluctably, their perspective is a human one. They speak to us of our fragility, sometimes through their most abstract photographs, their sparsest landscapes. They speak of passages, of the ephemeral, of traces left behind. I sensed in every one of them a compulsive urge to bear witness.
I also sensed uncertainty, perhaps even fear. In their desire to show things as they are, but from an entirely subjective, sincere perspective, their overriding concern is honesty and integrity. They are merely borrowing from reality. Their photography is a proposition, a personal perspective. It’s a shard of life, captured with full awareness and responsibility. Perhaps these photographers fear that the evidence will vanish.
The photographer shares the same obsession as the collector. Like him, he accumulates, until the images gathered together pile up, overflow, sometimes even aggress the eyes of those who look at them, leaving them with a sensation of inebriation, saturation, excess. Photography is, above all else, an act. It isn’t a random event; it is not beholden to the tenets of commercial success. Behind a photograph, there is a life, a vocation, and more than anything else, a commitment.
The photographer is probably closer to the idea of death than other people. He retains instants of life and freezes them; he embalms his subjects by giving them a form of eternity, as if he were warding off the fatal moment when all things become absent, when he himself will become absent. Photography is a little death. Whatever is shown in a photograph already belongs to the past.
For Mary Ellen Mark, great photography is the kind that warrants eternal questioning, the kind that can be read in an infinite number of ways. It’s this subjectivity that makes photography what it is. Photography is not objective merely because it represents a form of reality. All photographers have their own signature, their own perspective, their own interpretation. To be a photographer is to reveal oneself. Some of them explicitly tell their own stories. Araki’s work takes the form of a personal diary; Mimmo Jodice stubs his toe on every stone he photographs. Yet others attempt to efface themselves completely. Like, in a sense, Nachtwey, a man who reaches into his subjects’ souls like few others. And there is always the choice between black-and-white and colour, the choice of light, parallax, lens, angle, and subject. The photographer is the invisible character beyond the edges of the frame, the fly on the wall. He is the person who is able to scrutinize the situation, to tell the story. He is, either by choice or necessity, always in the image.
How strange, to spend a life taking pictures of other people; striving to enter their souls; preserving the memory of faces, landscapes, and events; constantly observing, constantly penetrating the meaning of things. It’s an unnatural act. It’s a form of voyeurism, passion, theft, and love.
Looking back at their shared journey, I can still hear the click of the shutter capturing faces, shouts, silences and humanity. Echoes of words forming themselves into reflections, seep through my consciousness. Together these photographers have travelled through a world without borders, embarked upon a journey that will never end.
Curator: Aasim Akhtar
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