Othering, debated through the discourse of reading the camera as a difference machine, seems at the crux of much of photography’s woes. Challenged by the notion that the machine is neutral in its observational and technical ability, the authorship and cultural means of producing images are undergoing a fruitful re-assessment of its terms to represent, but also the colonial and economic developments that have brought the medium into usage. Images are being questioned alongside intentions. Relationships between subject and author are scrutinized, as are how society views subjects and subject matter.
Recent questions regarding class, colonialism, gender, and race have come to the forefront in dissecting how we view photography, particularly the subject/authorship aspect. Assumptions about the camera’s ability to pressure social change are often considered net positives, however naive. In contrast, there is a longer track record of photography’s heinous history as an instrument of abuse, of social engineering, and as a machine that delegates hierarchy through categorical (often imagined) modes of representation: see eugenics.
Sociological, physical, and genetic differences give humanity its breadth, separating it into something broader than a set of binary types of value systems. Of course, it is not unusual that the breadth of our existence is documented at will. Still, the question to be solved is whether or not polite society sees, understands, and empathizes with a difference. We know the answer to be negative and that society, despite the prevailing idea of goodness it has about itself, based on moral justification of spiritual matters in large matter, is, in fact, not great at coping with otherness and notions of difference. At large, and according to Foucault, society will go to great lengths to distance the body from its outliers. It will marginalize and ostracize those who do not conform to the average median of human experience.
And such is the case of Gayatri and Swati Goswami, artist Debsuddha’s two aunts who, at birth, born with albinism, broadly exemplify differences in the already caste-oriented class hierarchy of Indian society. Born in Kolkata, the sisters have spent much of their lives living in relative seclusion in the north of the city where they were born and grew up in a 167-year-old residency. The shelter of the residency gives the sisters an atypical social experience but also provides safety from the outside world, which would potentially make a spectacle of their albinism. What at first appears as a lonely life filled with solitude and remoteness is analyzed under the Debsuddha lens as an environment that is safe but also, though limiting, somewhat magical. Some of this is due to how the artist photographs the sisters close together and separate and how the residence’s atmosphere is often labyrinthian.
In considerable measure, Debsuddha’s photographs present an air of melancholia. However, this is diminished due to the closeness between the two sisters, and hints of a more pastoral set of hues emerge, suggesting hope or rebirth. Lavender and aqua-marine preside, offsetting the delicate pallor of the women, and the environment takes on a more sympathetic tonality. It is a sweet story that, after the initial observations of the sister’s albinism, creates a mythical type of world-building exercise highly suggestive of magical realism, thus turning the plight of the sister’s social standing into something enduring and otherworldly. In contrast, this world is private. Debsuddha’s humane lens as a relative and author picks up on this essence. It is a beautiful book that reminds us of the better angels of our potential enlightenment, to understand and see people for the grace they can present over the outliers we desire them to be.
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