Taj Mahal and train in Agra, 1983. Credit Steve McCurry
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I had a disagreement with a friend last week about whether Teju Cole writes well about photography. I think he does. My friend thinks he’s a very talented writer and critic but much prefers Cole’s books above his criticism. We agreed to disagree and left it at that.
I don’t know what the final verdict on Cole will be, but I sure did enjoy his skewering of Steve McCurry and Coldplay—bland, bland men—in a single article. For me, it only strengthens the argument that he’s a good writer on photography.
In McCurry’s portraits, the subject looks directly at the camera, wide-eyed and usually marked by some peculiarity, like pale irises, face paint or a snake around the neck. And when he shoots a wider scene, the result feels like a certain ideal of photography: the rule of thirds, a neat counterpoise of foreground and background and an obvious point of primary interest, placed just so. Here’s an old-timer with a dyed beard. Here’s a doe-eyed child in a head scarf. The pictures are staged or shot to look as if they were. They are astonishingly boring.
[McCurry’s] photographs in “India,” all taken in the last 40 years, are popular in part because they evoke an earlier time in Indian history, as well as old ideas of what photographs of Indians should look like, what the accouterments of their lives should be: umbrellas, looms, sewing machines; not laptops, wireless printers, escalators.
and
The song [Hymn for the Weekend] is typical Coldplay, written for vague uplift but resistant to sense (“You said, ‘Drink from me, drink from me’/When I was so thirsty/Poured on a symphony/Now I just can’t get enough”). […] The video is a kind of exotification bingo, and almost like a live-action version of Steve McCurry’s vision: peacocks, holy men, painted children, incense. Almost nothing in the video allows true contemporaneity to Indians. They seem to have been placed there as a colorful backdrop to the fantasies of Western visitors.
It’s not so much the point that McCurry is old-hat, but that the point is made with so much panache. If I’d written such luscious take downs, I’d cart myself into retirement, all happy-like. Good stuff.
Cole, however, has other ideas. He’s not opposed to outsiders taking photos of India. He points out that Mary Ellen Mark made telling portraits of prostitutes in Mumbai which presented, with a new sensibility and focus, an ignored community.
Kemps Corner, Mumbai, 1989. Credit Succession Raghubir Singh
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Ultimately, the article is a celebration of Raghubir Singh, who is the best example of an Indian photographing India. The article is Cole’s call for us to (permanently?) redirect (all?) our energies from the photographs of McCurry and those of every fetishizing (white) (usually male) photographer who has mimicked McCurry, toward the photography of practitioners such as Singh and other cracking Indian photographers. Cole names them: Ketaki Sheth, Sooni Taraporevala, Raghu Rai and Richard and Pablo Bartholomew.
I mean, really, in a world replete with images made by folks in every corner of the globe, is there any defense for the space taken up by McCurry?
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Prison Photography 
3 comments
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March 30, 2016 at 7:07 pm
Matthew Rond (@MachuTheOne)
This, I think, is the most useful criticism from the piece…
“To consider a place largely from the perspective of a permanent anthropological past, to settle on a notion of authenticity that edits out the present day, is not simply to present an alternative truth: It is to indulge in fantasy.”
That editing out of modern India is troublesome.
And I agree here too…
“But there is also the question of what the photograph is for, what role it plays within the economic circulation of images. Some photographs, like Singh’s, are freer of the censorship of the market.”
That’s the difference between Cold Play and say… Bad Brains (sorry, old reference).
The part I don’t so much agree with is the personal preference of framing and composition…
“And when he shoots a wider scene, the result feels like a certain ideal of photography: the rule of thirds, a neat counterpoise of foreground and background and an obvious point of primary interest, placed just so.”
And…
“How do we know when a photographer caters to life and not to some previous prejudice? One clue is when the picture evades compositional cliché.”
In my opinion, these points undermine the stronger arguments made in this writing against the importance of McCurry’s images. McCurry’s compositions are conventional, that in itself doesn’t make them boring. Mary Ellen Mark’s photos praised later in the piece are looser in composition and feeling but don’t break any ground with regard to framing. They are much less idealistic, raw and human and present a more complex view of contemporary India.
Composition and framing isn’t what makes a photo boring, on a basic level those rules are useful to “excite” the frame and even more useful when pushed much further in the case of Singh. Boring photos are made by people with a simplistic worldview concerned with their images having wide appeal.
Sorry for the length here… I really wanted to go through this and have fun analyzing this writing for myself. For the record, I don’t own a single McCurry book but at the same time don’t think I could describe every McCurry photo from India as “boring”. I’ve never liked Coldplay and I love Bad Brains. I have a very complex worldview! :p
April 1, 2016 at 4:14 pm
Felipe
“The son must keep kill thy father.”
If you’re going to judge a work, you should at least recognize the time in which it was made, each time has its own psychology, ideals and prejudices. Those are constantly shifting, yes, but to outright dismiss them, or a person working under them as if he/she were in a vacuum of free will is disingenuous on the part of the critic.
Oh, and Coldplay, talk about kicking a dead horse.
Cole states the obvious with great enthusiasm and a decent vocabulary.
May 10, 2016 at 6:48 am
Photographers as Enterprises: McCurry vs Mapplethorpe | Nihilsentimentalgia
[…] men are real, of course, but they have also been chosen for how well they work as types.” As Pete Brook, from Prison Photography, states: “in a world replete with images made by folks in every corner of the globe, is there […]