UK-based photographer David Company believes that photography is a moving target and that it has the potential to harbour changes. Arjita Mishra attends his lecture
What Raghu Rai is to India, David Company is to the United Kingdom. Not only he has numerous books on photography to his name but he also travels the world educating people about the essence of photography – the power of the lens and what it means to possess that power. But very humbly he agrees to disagree. “I am not one of those globetrotting types who claim to have a grip on what’s going on everywhere,” he said at the inauguration of the Delhi Photo Festival at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts.
According to him there are concerns in photography that are international but there are also concerns that are very local. “I think there are many ways to think about the artistic identity of a photographer. There are also many ways to think about how viewers, critics and curators relate to them. It’s a big, generous and messy field. In a way, a festival of photography is where you experience the richness, complexity and the contradictions that always seem to come with the community. Photography is a moving target.”
He spoke about one of his books titled Affection and Suspicion and elaborated on his philosophies of the medium. “There are many reasons to be affectionate about photography but there are equally good reasons to be suspicious of it,” he said, “It seems clear to me that as a medium, photographs can be fascinating in compelling image makers and audiences. Whereas as a mass medium in the hyper commercialised service of all that is shallow, exploitative and distracting, there’s plenty of photography to be suspicious about. It has this complex capacity, of the ruling order, to establish agendas and the means by which how things are legitimised and governed.”
In the early 1910s the Van Gogh photographers in Europe and North America broke away from their association with conservative paintings and photographs along with their anxiety about the medium. Referring to the movement, David explained, “Instead they embraced the look of photography found in the rest of culture — the snapshot of fashion, still life, scientific photograph, and archival image, et al. This moving away from the salon painting version of photography to a more modern and worldly, reconnected photography to the complex and contradictory social life around it like never before. The shift also let in a new wildness and unpredictability in photography — the mechanic and automatic character of image.”