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.
Aasim Akhtar
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