Nathaniel Gaskell of Tasveer: To begin with, please can you tell us a little bit about the series:

PM: The portraits were all made during a trip to India in 1995. This was part of a larger project that began to push the experience of effacement up against belief (and essentially the thing that gives us our face). the entire series, as you have already noticed, is called ‘Prayer and Despair’. In this case, I equated despair to effacement and prayer to belief. So how do portraits fit into this? In a sense, these are less portraits than they are a way of grasping attention. Our coding and social conditioning requires that we pay attention to the face, to its nuances. When a face is ‘denied’ attention, it creates a fundamental discomfort in our being. At worst, this discomfort can manifest as despair. The series, and it is important that the images are seen as a series for a full consideration of the relationship between effacement and belief, relies on the placement of the ‘portraits’ in relation to the other photographs for this to make sense. I also use the play of shadow and light as form to generate this relationship within each photographic frame.
NG: Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’m assuming you’re using the word ‘effacement’ to also mean absolution, as well as more literally to mean the ‘removal of face’, as in to make oneself disappear, blend in, become un-personalised. It seems to me that the first meaning is more tightly related to the overall concept of your Prayer and Despair project, and the latter, more relevant to the portraits presented here.

PM: I think there is a cluster of emotional states that are affiliated to self-ishness (the ‘selfish’ part of ‘self’, if that makes any sense): blame, guilt, and vengefulness being some, and even, with a slight stretch, despair. What exactly pushes us from selfishness to selflessnes, I think, is related to a particular type of absolution or effacement. It is not the kind of absolution that is granted from external forces – the more Catholic version in other words – but absolution that is more autogenerative, more from within oneself. That is why I prefer thinking of my work, especially the portraits, in terms of effacement. My cultural mix of both West and East, somehow associates effacement as something one does to oneself, and absolution as a bestowed act.
NG: To my mind, the way in which the concepts of belief and absolution relate to each other is quite a Christian debate (I remember learning about Paul, and therefore the discussion as to whether one is righteous/absolved through faith/prayer alone, or through one’s deeds and actions). How do these two concepts work in an Indian context? to what extent does the idea of religion as specifically practiced in India inform the concept of the portraits, and the wider series?

PM: I touch on some of this in my response to the question about absolution and effacement. I think this particular question gets to the core difference between Christian — dare I say all monotheistic — belief systems and the ‘rest’. If one takes the liberty of associating the ‘rest’ to the Indian context, then it is simple enough to say that religious practice in India is less cellular by nature that with Christianity. It is more porous, based more on ‘yes, and…’ than ‘either this or that …’. But this is too simple an analysis. Both approaches actually compartmentalize experience, comporatmentalize in a metaphysical sense. The relationship between belief and absolution may be more interestingly compared by looking at how each belief culture, if you will, actually locates these compartments within there cosmologies. With the monotheistic, generally I find that belief defines the compartment, whilst with the ‘rest’ belief tends to either emanate from an association of compartments, or remain as an equal to these compartments. Coming back to the portraits then, and  the rest of this work, I would say that it is, just like the poreceeding sentence, very confusing until one stops trying to make sense of it. The associations between portrait and weathered sandstone sculpture, between light raking across a temple floor and a coconut husk address not so much belief as that which compels us and binds us to belief. I think that Eastern (Indian) metaphysics, in the way it acknowledges our cognitive limits and then tries to address the methods of going beyond this, is much more relevant to my work than Indian religion.
NG: Can you talk a bit about your nationality/cultural identity and how (if at all) this plays a part in your work. Something we’re often confronted with at Tasveer is this idea of ‘Indian Photography’. There are those photographers who live and work in India, those of Indian origin who make work about their native country, and then there are foreigners who make photographic projects in India (where a lot is written and discussed about ‘the gaze’). Where do you fit in and are these distinctions relevant? Is there a need for such a term as ‘Indian photography’?

PM: I was born in East Africa, with both parents also having grown up there as first generation migrants from Gujerat. My current nationality is British and US American, and as far as my cultural identity goes, it is an even more complex mix. I lived in Tanzania until 11 years of age, growing up in a small town that was very cosmopolitan —  my parents and my friends came from a wide range of geographic and cultural zones. From 11 to 15, I studied at St. Paul’s School Darjeeling, then spent two years in Spain, and finished up with A-levels at a Quaker school in England before going to art school. From there, I attended graduate school in Scotland, where I remained for ten years before finally moving to Tennessee, USA. I go into these details because my upbringing and education define what has often been considered as an annoyingly multifarious quality in both my work and my thinking. The matter of identity  is really one about relationships. Just as individuals seem more comfortable forming realtionships with some prior knowledege of who they are dealing with, so it may be with cultures. India is rewriting itself, and this process is on an accelarating trajectory. I believe, and I may be wrong, that much of what distinguishes India from the rest of the world has to do with the way it pulls the ancient into the contemporary, the way it elides these two. Photography seems, in its leanings towards addressing the human condition, aptly suited to imaging this India, Indianess and perhaps most important, to generating civic discourse. I do think that the most important constituents to address in this dynamic complex are the ones who live and work in India. There will always be the tourist artists (I can easily fall into this category) or the remote philosophers or armchair artists (again, drop me in this one too!), no matter the region being considered, but there is a lot to be said for the deep consideration over extended time about specifics, and the way these specifics relate to the global context. I think Indian photography as a term or classifier is most important when considered as a dynamic and engaged manifestation of this transformative period that the nation is in.
NG: Can you elaborate a bit more on the effect of taking the portraits out of the wider context of the series? (When seen as a series of portraits like this, perhaps a natural conclusion for the audience to reach is that this is a bit like a typology. Each person is an individual, yet also representative of a group).

PM: Even in work where the photographic frame is dominated by the face (such as in the series, ‘Looking At God’) I rely heavily on a ‘holographic’ approach — that at all aspects of a body of work or series is alluded to, albeit in coarser resolution, by any part or fragment of that work. I am not interested in typologies however — I realize this seems at odds with the previous sentence, but if one considers that typologies are ultimately about informing comparative approaches, and thus taxonomic in nature, then it makes sense that the holographic approach is about the opposite of systems that classify and categorize. It is more about that which is most fundamental and yet — and this is the most important for me — most constantly referring to the rest of itself. Jings – this is getting deep. All of these portraits are of people I have spent time with, that I know. I mention this not to provide another argument against considering the work as typological but as an indicator of how the entire content of the photogaphic frame informs the portrait. What else is in the image, both its form and its figurativeness, is informed by the person being photographed and the photographer, and this is always a singular conjunction. I hope the result then, is more an individualisation rather than a typological representation.

Orkney Futures: a handbook

A small piece by me is included in the recently published  ’Orkney Futures: a handbook‘:

A new collection describing what may lie ahead for Orkney. From Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney to Orkney poet Robert Rendall, OIC Convenor Stephen Hagan to Orcadian, Big Brother celebrity Cameron Stout, 49 views of the future to inspire and encourage.

‘Orkney Futures… is a handbook like no other. For a small book, it tackles ambitious themes.’ Ron Ferguson

‘Such books, or public-actions, bridge art and social thinking – a gentler and therefore more penetrating form of thinking seems to emerge, when we look to the future in this designated non-designated space…’ Alec Finlay

Thanks to editors Alistair Peebles & Laura Watts for the honor of including me in this work.

Today, flu-bound and bored, feeling sorry for myself and full of the blahs, I started trawling for this other me. I found one comment on the APUG forum which stated that I no longer make platinum-palladium prints. And another that was both complimentary and expressed another commentator’s ire about my work.

I manifest here as me. And my work.

References made during the talk:

“The truth that matters to people is not factual truth but moral truth; not a narrative that tells what happened but a narrative that explains why it happened and who is responsible… The idea that reconciliation depends on shared truth about the past is possible. But truth is related to identity. What you believe to be true depends, in some measure on who you believe yourself to be. And who you believe yourself to be is mostly defined in terms of who you are not.” - Michael Ignatieff, reprint from “Articles of Faith” published in the May, 1996 issue of the Index on Censorship [I think this quote is at the heart of a rather tragic and heated argument between Ignatieff and other Human Rights academics - read more on this]

“The artist is like a tree – he knows how to find his way in this bewildering world, well enough to bring some order into the stream of impressions and experiences impinging on him. This orientation among the phenomena of nature and human life, this order in all its ramifications, that is like the root part of our tree. From there the artist – who is the trunk part of the tree – receives the sap that flows through him and through his eye.
Under pressure of this mighty flow, he transmits what he has seen to his work. His work then, is like the crown of the tree, spreading in time and space for all to see.”- Paul Klee, Jena Lecture, 1924. 

“I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments. I am not a relativist; I do not say ‘I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps’ — each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false. But I do believe that there is a plurality of values which men can and do seek, and that these values differ. There is not an infinity of them: the number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.” - Isiah Berlin, ‘The First and the Last’, New York review of Books, 14 May 1988

“The message is not one of simple pessimism. We need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.” - John Glover, “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,”

“Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It’s what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts — often there are thousands or millions of them — and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.” - from an interview with Steve Johnson by David Sims and Rael Dornfest, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference  – 2/22/2002

Madame Yolande Lafontant, Mr. Bossuet Sainvillus, Ms. Gillen Warn and Pere Fritz Lafontant meeting with Sewanee students for breakfast this morning
8:42 AM CST 

Sewanee students and community watching a live-cast of President Barack Obama being sworn in, 11:04 AM CST.

Today, within a space of two hours, I went from having breakfast with Pere Fritz Lafontant, director of Zanmi Lasante, Haiti…. to watching Barack Obama being sworn in as the 44th president of the U.S.A. Two people who inspire hope. The former has already made that hope manifest by transforming thousands of lives. The latter carries the best wishes of millions towards fulfilling his (and our) aspirations. My wish for the day – that Pere Lafontant gets to spend a day with Barack Obama. 

“There is no such thing as a miserable situation – only a situation that is miserably accepted” – Pere Fritz Lafontant

This is the citation I wrote for (Dr.) Pere Fritz Lafontant’s honorary doctorate, which was bestowed upon him by Sewanee: 

For over forty-five years, Father Fritz Lafontant and his wife, Yolande, have worked in Haiti, bringing attention to the plight of those displaced by an ill-considered hydro-electric project, Father Lafontant has created long-term solutions to environmental degradation, malnutrition, infectious disease and mortality. 

Despite being faced with infant and child mortality rates of over 25% in 1962, he and Yolande established a school in Cange. From there, Father Lafontant’s vision for a healthier, better educated and environmentally harmonious community began to become a reality. Working with local and US partners, he guided Dr. Paul Farmer in 1982 to form an organization that is now famously known as Partners in Health, or Zanmi Lasante. Today, under the directorship of Father Lafontant, Zanmi Lasante provides care for up to a million people, and has a maternal health and pediatric program, a state-of-the-art STD clinic, and a tuberculosis and infectious disease center. This institution teaches local residents to become midwives, nurses, health workers and counselors. The work of Zanmi Lasante includes building schools, homes and communal water systems and providing employment for area residents.

Father Lafontant’s influence has extended across the world, and we are fortunate to have been touched by it on this mountain of ours. For his ability to preserve and sustain life and the environment, for his generosity of spirit, his selflessness and his vision, and for helping the University’s mission, as students travel from this mountain to the mountains of Cange, the University is honored to bestow upon Father Fritz Lafontant the degree of Doctor of Religion, honoris causa.

Pere Fritz Lafontant. Haiti, 2007. From the series ‘Looking at God‘
22×22 inches. Archival pigment print 

Been a bit quiet on the blog and site – just dealing with the busy-ness of a new semester, and this historic week. Along with big MLK celebrations, tomorrow, Sewanee is giving an honorary degree to one of my heroes, Pere Fritz Lafontant, director of Zanmi Lasante in Cange, Haiti. And then there is Tuesday…

Imogen Cunningham: Magnolia Blossom, 1926

Imogen Cunningham’s work, along with Bernice Abbott’s , is showing at Lumiere Gallery in Atlanta. A must see.

Expiration II – from series ‘Campsite for the Non-Citizen‘
Archival pigment print, 32 x 24 inches from 11×14 negative

Some of my work, including the image above, is on show for a few more days at the Royal Scottish Academy. It is part of the ‘Kaleidoscope‘ exhibition, which “showcases a selection of seventy of the finest photographs and prints acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland over the past few years, through purchase, gift and bequest.

The works on show range in period from the Italian Renaissance to contemporary Scotland. They are arranged both to reveal some striking contrasts, and highlight the extraordinary diversity of these acquisitions.” Please send me a photo of the install if you happen to visit!