[Reader-list] Digital Mixing and the Transmutation of Popular Image-Production

[Nancy Adajania]

Posting by NANCY ADAJANIA
[SARAI/CSDS Independent Fellowship 2004]


Subject: Digital Mixing and the Transmutation of
Popular Image-Production in Contemporary Urban Indian
Contexts


I have been engaged in research on an emerging urban
sociology of self-representation, location, aspiration
and intimacy that has been generated, during the last
five years, around a newly available visual reality.
This visual reality is articulated by means of Digital
Mixing (DM): a technique by which hybrid or composite
images are produced on Adobe Photoshop, through the
reformatting of photographic portraits using stock
landscapes, architectural detail, props, costumes,
body parts, deities or symbols extracted from the
print media and the Net (such stock is usually
pirated; licensed software is very rarely encountered
in this sphere).

The images under review here follow the rites of
passage of an individual’s or couple’s life, family
ceremonies and community festivities. The sites where
these images are produced and circulated is
noteworthy: typically, it is the small ID-picture-type
photography shops and kiosks in Bombay (the area where
I have conducted my fieldwork for this project),
patronised by clients belonging to the middle and
subaltern classes. Thus, the clientele for this
technology – which catered to the higher end of
consumer when first introduced – is now found among
classes of lower purchasing power too. This is, of
course, symptomatic of the democratisation of a medium
that follows the broader dissemination of any new
technology.

I would like to dwell on the paradox that, although
these images pertain to private life, they are
composed from highly public and even interchangeable
templates and devices. Further, when treated as a flux
or evolving corpus, these images constitute a circuit
in which event, memory and representation are
intimately connected; and in which the trajectories of
private desire and the directions of social change
intersect in ways that are not always predictable.

My contention is that these images reflect a change in
public imagination, as an expression of a macro-level
trend towards familial ‘privatism’ (to adapt Habermas’
concept of civil privatism, under which the enriched
private life is seen to have become the locus of
individual aspiration at the cost of individual
engagements in the public sphere). I will return to
this theme, and qualify it for the contemporary Indian
context, later in this exposition.

The phenomenon under review marks the conjunction of
various factors, which I give below in the form of a
provisional menu:

1. The advent of new technologies of representation
forms the immediate provocation in the present: I
allude to the availability, at the mass level, of new
digital pictorial technologies – both hardware and
software, as well as efficient and qualitatively
viable copying and printing options. 

2. Inherited traditions of representation: this refers
to the conventions of pose, gaze, look, backdrop and
manner that flow from such sources as (a) classic
19th-century photography studio practice, especially
using painted trompe l’oeuil backdrops; (b) the
lineage of votive donor images, especially in the
Vaishnava forms of worship, such as the manorath
images of Nathadwara, for instance; (c) the demotic
idioms that have emphasised such spheres of human
activity as leisure and recreation, especially as
portrayed through the recording of novelty, new
landscapes of pleasure, architectures of desire and
fresh imaginations of self through role model,
occupation or possessions (I have in mind,
particularly, the wall paintings of the havelis of
Shekhawati, a reference as important as the more often
cited Kalighat images); (d) the variety of
hand-painted photographs popular in various regions in
colonial India, and still popular in collage variants;
and (e) what may be called the ‘shaadi video’ culture,
which emerged during the late 1980s as video
technology entered India and wedding ceremonies could
be videographed, as a progression from the customary
record by means of still photography; and, just as VHS
has given way, successively, to VCD and DVD, these
forms are now aligned with the use of DM in the
collation and presentation of the wedding photo album.

3. Spectacular models of representation: these would
range from (a) jingoistic NRI-oriented Hindi films
such as Karan Johar’s ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’, which
fuse the feudal patriarchal family structure with the
affluence of capitalism in the age of globalisation;
through (b) theme parties and weddings (such as, most
recently, that of the Mittal family of tycoons in
Paris); and (c) theme parks and film locations as foci
of visualisation (especially the Ramoji Film City,
Hyderabad); to (d) domestic space-oriented TV serials
(their exterior of novelty packages feudal values and
structures). I would also include, as influential
factors under the rubric of spectacular models of
representation (e) the rise of a Page 3 subculture in
the popular press and (f) the augmentation of the
advertising image during the 1990s, in terms of the
formal density of the individual advertising image or
text, as well as its widespread dispersal through
24-hour satellite TV and mass-producible vinyl
billboards, and its consequent power to penetrate into
the fabric of social experience.

Thus, what is under scrutiny in my project is the new
social play of fantasy that has come into being
through the interplay among the social, economic and
cultural vectors indicated above.


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