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From subtle to being truly garish and cheap, painted photographs, which seem Every time I cycled past that photographer’s shop on my way to college — the ‘Vishnu Studio’ it was called, I think, right in the heart of Hoshiarpur — I remember being struck by two somewhat fading portraits that I would see in the shop window, one in black and white and the other in colour.
It was the same face —
a bride, shyly looking upwards — in fact it was the same photograph:
two versions of the same reality. The one in black and white had a
simple, almost honest, aspect; the other, originally also in black and
white, looked bright and shiny, having been coloured with hand:
pomegranate red lips, blue eyes, faint blush on the cheeks, a
pearls-and-ruby clip holding the hair. Even a finely worked necklace,
missing in the black and white original, had been added. It was as if,
through this display in the window, the photographer were proclaiming:
this is what I can also do; make a different person out of you if you
were to Painted photographs have a history, of course. Long before colour printing came in, photographs had started taking on colour, essentially through a photographer, or a collaborator, who would take up a brush and begin working on the print in front of him. In the words of a historian of art: "As photography grew more popular following its invention in 1839, its admirers did not understand how a medium that rendered shapes and textures in exquisite detail could fail to render them in realistic colour." Evidently, something needed to be done, not only for drenching the eye in colour, but also to ensure that the captured images did not fade easily over time. So came in the idea of painting — ‘over-painting’, really — photographs with substances ranging from watercolour and oil to chalk and crayon. Images, mostly portraits, were enlarged, enhanced, altered. What was happening in Europe began, as in so many other things, happening in India too, where photography had, astonishingly, arrived within two short years of its having been invented. Here, at the courts of the local potentates — Maharajas, Nawabs, Thakurs, and the like — who were eagerly embracing all that was exotic, especially all that pleased the Sahibs — was extant not only a natural interest in portraiture, but also a retained ‘work-force’ of traditional artists. There, at these courts, a collaboration between photographers and painters was easy to envisage. The result? Many photographers — wielders of the lens — turned into ‘artists’ of sorts, and some artists adopted the camera as another of their tools. One begins to see — paralleling developments in Japan and Turkey and Russia and Bohemia, apart of course from Britain and America — a whole range of ‘royal’ portraits, rulers and princes appearing resplendent in colour in the midst of opulent, even theatrical, settings. With time, and the coming of colour photography, things changed, however. The need to over-paint black and white photographs with colour began disappearing. And yet, a number of painted photographs, relics of a not-very-distant past, have survived, some of them having languished for years in raj bhandars, others in rickety cupboards of prudent photographers. Painted photographs raise questions, of course. And many of them have started being addressed to available materials, as in a recent book/catalogue of Painted Photographs selected from the collection of the legendary Ebrahim Alkazi. Does this crucial "meld of realistic documentation and artistic manipulation", as Rahaab Allana, curator of the show, calls it, not provide us with insights into the way the mind of the patron and the artist had started to change? Do these images, having moved out of the courtly circles and into the lives of people of ordinary or no rank, not reflect a significant shift in society, and societal values? Or, again, does the artistic intervention that painted photographs represent not challenge our notion of the camera’s faithfulness to ‘truth’? And so on. Questions such as these apart, there is, simply, a delight that resides in these hybrid artefacts. They can vary from being very subtle to being truly garish and cheap. But they always tell a story. I have seen photographs of princely figures from the Malwa region dressed in magnificently patterned robes, painted on in colours that recall the glory of old miniatures, but I have also seen images of ‘nautch girls’ flaunting in colour what seem to be more than their natural charms. An occasional image comes along in which everything in the photograph is over-painted except the hands and the face which the ‘painter’ had retained from the photograph just as they were, either because of the want of adequate skills, or — just possibly — for allowing a connection between his own craft and that of the photographer to be seen. Also come along images, like that of the fleshy lady, dressed in an impossibly patterned sari, vague flowers stuck in her hair, resting her hands on the arm of an upholstered chair, gazing dreamily into the distance, even as a ‘Parsi’ table stands out against a painted curtain at the back. There is such a range, but also such delight, in all this. Interestingly, all technological advances notwithstanding, the painting of photographs by hand seems, in our own times, to have got a second wind, as it were. A number of artists are at work simply producing modern painted photographs. Whether the technique is ‘hand tinting’, ‘hand colouring’, or ‘hand painting’ — a careful distinction is established between these — these artists take on almost any subject, from landscapes to old theatres to antique cars. One of them, Allan Teger, whose photographs re-worked in colours stand out in reputation, says he is completely in love with the old process. Because, as he says, especially of his landscapes, for him "it is the colour of memory: the timeless moment where we can still feel the energy of all the people who could have passed by that spot". Right?
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