‘I am a rebel, soul rebel, am a capturer soul adventurer’
Waswo X. Waswo |
Poet and photographer Waswo X. Waswo recently released his collection of photographs on India titled ‘India Poems’ at the Bombay Art Gallery, Mumbai. Amrita Gupta Singh, through her razor sharp questions attempts to bring out this man behind camera for www.artconcerns.com.
Amrita Gupta-Singh: Your works reveal an empathetic view of India. You have spoken about your family connections with India?
Waswo X. Waswo: My father was based in India, during World War II. He was actually in Bombay at the time of that famous incident when the ammunitions ship blew up in the harbour. I heard that story all the time when I was a kid. My dad had the habit of telling it repeatedly. He also had an incredible scrapbook of old picture postcards and very tiny black and white snaps of India and what is now Pakistan. I was fascinated by India for as long as I can remember, picking up all the books about India I could find in my school’s library. By the way, my father is spending his old age, living near the beach in Goa.
AGS: There is an interesting story behind your name.
W.X.W.: The name Waswo can be traced from America back to Germany, and into Poland and finally into Russia. At one time in our family’s history there was a Russian suffix to the name, but it was dropped. A number of years ago, I started using my family name twice, for exhibition purposes. I was inspired by Horst P. Horst; the glamour photographer of the 1930’s, who changed his very German-sounding name (Horst Bohrmann) for obvious reasons. I see the “X” as a sort of multiplication sign. The name change happened during a period I was experiencing tremendous personal and artistic growth…so the “X” is for multiplication, and also for “ex” as in expatriate or the prefix that implies no longer being what you had been before.
AGS: What induced you to take up photography seriously? How do you arrive at a subject of your work? And contextualize it? Which are the people and places you have covered in India Poems? Any hostility you have faced from your chosen subjects?
W.X.W.: That’s a lot of questions! I actually used to be a painter. I did a lot of very colorful abstractions, and also, honestly, a lot of alcohol and drugs. Photography started for me as a way of rediscovering reality. The camera brought me back to the real world, and to some extent out of this private abstract world I had created for myself. The subject of my work though is not really “India”. I guess I would say the subject of my work has always been how travel and the experience of different places, people, and cultures affect us personally. I do a lot of self-portraits. In “India Poems” I happen to have been photographing in Kerala, Goa, Himachal and Rajasthan…but I never saw myself as “documenting” those places. The work is more an expression of my own experiences and revelations.
Hostility from my subjects? Never! Any hostility that has been directed at me has come from segments of the Indian urban middle class, who sometimes feel I have a foreigner’s obsession with portraying India’s poor.
AGS: There have been two broad movements in photography, Pictorialism and Straight Photography. Your works are clearly affiliated to the former, a 19th Century movement. Who have been your mentors/influences? Any Indian photographers whose work you admire?
W.X.W.: It took photography a long time to establish itself as a valid art form, and for photographers to be recognized as authentic artists. Pictorialism was an early photographic movement that sought to imitate the composition and atmospherics of traditional paintings. Pictorialism did a lot in the early years to help establish photography as an art, and not just a mechanical process. Then people like Stieglitz, and Walker Evans came along and rejected Pictorialism as an attempt to imitate painting, and argued persuasively that photography had its own aesthetics, and that the best photographs looked like photographs. They were right in a way, but I think their rejection of Pictorialism was too absolutist. Pictorialism had a lot to offer, and I go back to it often as a reference point. I am one of the few people who speak well of photographers such as Edward Curtis, who did Pictorialist work of Native American subjects. Some people get angry at Curtis for “romanticizing” the American Indian, and others get angry at him for not being ethnographically correct, and still others get angry at him for not being politically correct. What all of his critics miss is the intense beauty of his creations…the poetic spirit that permeates each of his images. For me it is a sad thing when politics gets in the way of our seeing. As for Indian photographers who have influenced me, I would have to say right away Dr. K.L. Kothary, who used to photograph for the Illustrated Weekly of India in a very Pictorialist manner. Also much of Raghu Rai’s and Raghubir Singh’s work, which can be as poetic as it is documentary.
AGS: You are also a poet. Apart from photographers, any kind of literature has influenced your works?
W.X.W.: I always loved the Beat poets and writers. I still like that kind of stream of consciousness, autobiographical, approach to the world. I love Whitman, and other artists / writers who feel a kinship with the common man. Obviously I love Indian authors such as Rushdie, Anita Desai, Naipaul, and Rohinton Mistry. The best writers in English these days are coming from India.
AGS: You do not just “click”, you “make” a photograph? What are the processes involved in this making?
W.X.W.: I just hate it when magazines and newspapers credit someone for having “clicked” a photo. That term makes it sound as if there wasn’t any work involved. Good photography is not a snapshot. It takes a lot of training, forethought, analysis, and very fine print making. It is an art, similar to the way making a finely-crafted etching is an art. Even digital photography, when it is done well, is exceptionally difficult. I go into a lot of the technical aspects in the book.
AGS: What is your view of tradition and modernity? What have been your concerns as experienced in your inter-cultural way of life?
W.X.W.: I think this question gets to the heart of this body of work. When I was young my dad ran a very small, independent grocery store. In the late 1960’s, he was driven out of business by the new large supermarkets. In my lifetime, I watched corporate America destroy millions of family businesses…restaurants, groceries, clothing shops and the like. Everything in America is run by the big corporations these days. America has been turned into one big mall or Wal-Mart. India still has a wonderful culture of small barbershops and vegetable markets and family-owned neighborhood shops. This culture is wonderful, and empowers people, but maybe people do not appreciate it until it is gone.
AGS: You cancel out all traces of modernity and globalization in your photographs. One can not deny the entry and influence of the media in the villages of India. Isn’t your series too romantic / idealistic in this sense?
W.X.W.: I am of course a modern man. I love my computer and the Internet. I sometimes shoot digital. But I fear that globalization and “modernization” has become just another term for Americanization…the turning over of society’s control to the large corporations. I think that a chai cup made of clay is more modern than a plastic cup. The clay chai cup is environment friendly and ecologically correct. I love the dishes made of pressed leaves that things like samosas are served on. I think they are more modern than an environmentally unfriendly thermocore box, like the ones you get at McDonalds. In other words, I want people to question what it means to be “modern”, because too often people assume that progress is what the media and the big corporations are selling them. But people can define their own modernity.
AGS: You do not see yourself as a documentary photographer, and cringe at the word exotic.
W.X.W.: I think this goes back to the previous questions. First, I am in no position to “document” a culture that I know very little about, and will always be an outsider to. Second, I am not sure if I understand the word “exotic”. According to the American Heritage Dictionary it means “intriguingly unusual, different”. But that is a very relative concept. What is intriguingly different to me, may be very commonplace to you, and vice versa. In this body of photographs I tried very hard to keep the influences of global culture out of the frame. I didn’t want to portray those parts of India that look the same as Tokyo or London or New York. I was trying to find images that to me were purely Indian. In the process I guess I gravitated toward those things that were “intriguingly different”, and thus some would say exotic. But when an Indian artist such as Jyoti Bhatt photographs disappearing village life is he accused of looking for the exotic? I don’t think so. The word is just too relative and nebulous for me, and in today’s art world I think it is used selectively, primarily to question the moral integrity of artists from the West.
AGS: The brownness of your sepia-toned photographs can also be seen conceptually, rather than just a technical process – brownness of Indian skin, brownness of the earth, soil, dust, old forts and huts. Can this be seen as a device to move closer to your subjects, or is it a sense of nostalgia towards a fast disappearing alternative world?
W.X.W.: I’ve loved the sepia-toning process from the moment I made my first sepia print, some twenty-five years ago. For me, it takes an image out of the present time frame, and places it an ambiguous other-time. Sepia-tone makes it obvious that my photos are not meant to be documentary, since there is an attempt to avoid real time. I’m sure many people approach these images from a nostalgic point of view, but that isn’t my intent. I don’t want people to long for the past. I want them to see the present in a different manner. I want to slow them down, pull them out of their fast-paced corporate worlds and get them to really see again. Maybe in doing that people will realize that some of the things they think of as nostalgic or old-fashioned are in actuality very relevant and meaningful.
AGS: You work via the concepts of beauty, composition, symmetry and rhythm. As a photographer in the 21st century, how do you propose your work be different from the earlier pictorialists?
W.X.W.: I don’t adhere strictly to pictorialist concepts. I allow myself a lot of freedom to move between styles, and in fact, if you strip the sepia-tone from some of my images, they appear quite like “straight photography”. I also do a lot of self-portraits and insert personal narrative.
AGS: Would you describe your work as post-modernist?
W.X.W.: In the sense that I do not subscribe to modernist dictates, and am not truly pre-modernist, I guess that makes me a post-modernist. I really dislike all these labels, though I guess we must use them. I’m post-modernist in that I float rather freely between expressive forms. Currently I’m working on a series of auto-biographical miniaturist paintings, collaborating with various artists in Rajasthan. My next body of photographic work is going to be purely digital black and whites. In the sense that I feel free from dogmatic restraints, I am post-modernist.
AGS: You have faced criticism of just creating an archetypal “Other” of native types and native scenes, following an inherited tradition of ethnography. Conditions of photographing in a post-colonial, modern democracy like India brings up issues of identity, power, domination and exploitation. A recent newspaper review also described your work to be meaningless, unable to connect beyond the pretty frames! How do you deal with such angry voices on India, which I am sure you have faced a lot.
W.X.W.: As an expatriate American living in India I know I will always meet with a certain amount of hostility. The truth is that the average Indian, who I deal with on a day-to-day basis, is totally friendly and welcoming to me. I love living in Udaipur, and I love visiting the village where my father lives in Goa. I really love India…all of it. But being an artist in India is a two-edged sword for a Westerner. In some ways a lot of doors open, because we are seen as an oddity…maybe “exotic” is the correct word…and the Indian press and art establishment is eager to know about us. But the other edge of the sword is that we are never fully accepted. We are looked upon with some suspicion. I have been told that a Westerner can never photograph India properly. That is an outrageous idea, and shows a very closed attitude.
AGS: What has been the response towards your work internationally.
W.X.W.: People from the West see my work very differently. Yes, I think Westerners are conditioned to want the thrill of exoticism from India. They also tend to see people as “poor”, when in fact the people photographed may actually be quite successful, prosperous, farmers, landowners, or shopkeepers. There is confusion in Western minds, sometimes mistaking what is rural and traditional for poverty.
AGS: Two works are of particular interest to me. One is “My Private Driver, Jaitu” and the other is “My Assistant Smokes a Beedi”. What are the stories behind these photographs?
W.X.W.: I had an assistant whose name was Sreenu, and the image of him smoking a beedi really captures his combination of tough-guy machismo and sensitive vulnerability. Jaitu was my private driver in Rajasthan back in 1999…it is one of the older photos. He happened to be in front of this copy of David’s famous painting of a Parisian socialite, and the juxtaposition of the two made this incredible image. It says a lot about colonialism, in a very direct yet silent way. Both of these stories are long, so I guess I’d suggest people read the book rather than trying to explain them here.
AGS: What are you future plans, post India Poems?
W.X.W: I just want to chill on the beach in Goa for a while. After that, there are a million new projects. The wonderful thing about photography is that the opportunities are endless.
(Poet and photographer Waswo X. Waswo has exhibited widely in India, including Mumbai, Bangalore, Goa and Cochin. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A., and has studied at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Center for Photography, and Studio Marangoni, The Center for Contemporary Photography in Florence, Italy. He has published two volumes of poetry, and one book of photography.
Mr. Waswo currently keeps homes in both Udaipur and Goa. He is working on a new photography book, as well as another volume of written poems.)
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