The other India is the country’s larger reality: Dinesh Khanna

Dinesh Khanna in New Delhi recently. Photo: The Punch

Jan 25, 2018

To Dinesh Khanna, photography is an extension of his very being. He observes, therefore, he is. His observations bestow upon him the ability to process it in his work, sometimes consciously, but often unconsciously. Khanna, co-founder of the Delhi Photo Festival, has been involved in creating images for advertising, editorial and corporate clients, specifically in the area of food, still-life, people and interiors for over two-and-a-half-decades. He uses his medium to “share my aesthetics as well as express my concerns”.

Most of his photography, Khanna says, happens instinctively. “You are blessed if you are born with visual talent, but over the years, you also collect a lot of experiences and also observe what is interesting in terms of angles, compositions, light ...how light works on certain things...how expressions on human faces work...how people interact with each other...I usually tell my students: Don’t shoot all the time, but watch all the time.These observations get stored in that hard disc also called the brain, where you are not consciously referring to it every time you’re shooting, but sub-consciously your mind is making those connections,” says Khanna, who curated the photography programme at the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF), held in Panjim, between December 15-22, 2017.

The second edition of SAF saw Khanna introduce us to the archival and contemporary photographic practices. The objective of the programming, according to the festival brochure, was to focus on the “inter-disciplinarity in photography, with projects addressing a myriad of topics ranging from environmentalism to the history of Indian jazz”. As the discipline curator, Khanna designed Nature Untamed: An Exhibition of Africa’s Wildlife, as captured by Anup Shah and A Slow Violence: Stories from the Largest River Basin in the World, which focused on stories of personal and ecological loss from the Ganga-Brahamputra basin — the largest river basin in the world. The latter, a photographic installation, distilled the images shot by Arati Kumar Rao over the past three years at the basin.

“I do believe that art — and that includes photography too— has somehow been trapped into believing that good art can only be art which is socially conscious. Good art is only that which would want to save and change the world. A good artist is only someone who is socially responsible. I think that is too restrictive a definition and traps art in a very singular space,” says Khanna. Excerpts from an interview:

Nawaid Anjum: Let’s start with Reciprocation, your last show with Kathryn Myers. How did it come about?

Dinesh Khanna: When I met Kathryn Myers, a Fullbright scholar who is also an Arts Professor in the USA, she was doing a project on Indian artists and she had seen my column called ‘Double Take’ in the First City magazine. Whenever Kathryn came to India, she used to refer to the First City magazine as it covered the art and culture scene in great detail. She got in touch and wanted to interview me for her project, ‘Regarding India”and discuss my work as a photographer. After that, we kept in touch. Both of us have an interest in Varanasi and that's actually where we met first. She did my interview for her website in Varanasi. Through Nazar Foundation, we organise “Nazar ka Adda”, every two-three months in which we invite people to talk about their work. Kathryn was one of the photographers we’d invited to talk. We noticed that there was an interesting similarity but also a difference in the way we saw the same subject: Varanasi. Both of us look at colour, but being a painter, her vision is somewhat different from mine. That’s how ‘Reciprocation’ came about. It is interesting to work with another photographer and juxtapose your work against his/her works. I have done that once earlier. That’s actually how Nazar Foundation came into being; Prashant Panjiar is my Co-Trustee in Nazar Foundation. He and I did a two-photographer exhibition with Palette Art Gallery called ‘Tirtha’ about 6-7 years ago. Prashant had done a lot of work on the Kumbh Mela in Black & White and I have done a lot of work on spirituality and faith. I’ve done a book on spirituality too, called “Living Faith.” The show, “Tirtha”, juxtaposed Prashant’s B&W photojournalistic works of the Kumbh and mine from the Faith series. It was, again, a conversation between two photographers in which we talked about the same thing but from a different viewpoint.

Dinesh Khanna. Photo courtesy of Dinesh Khanna

I think that’s what makes art of any kind, whether photography or dance or music richer because when you are able to actually accept and enjoy another point of view and give it enough space in your own mind as an alternative way of looking at an object or situation, it ends up enriching you. It’s something that’s true of democracy and politics too. The problem with India these days is that people are not ready to agree with another’s point of view. One has got to at least listen to the other person. So, in photography or art or politics, one must be willing to open one’s mind enough to listen and then reciprocate and have a conversation. Instead of becoming antagonistic, one should try to find a meeting point between the two ways of seeing.

Nawaid Anjum: This quest to find the meeting grounds and have a conversation with another artist springs from a deep well of experience and understanding of your craft. Let’s talk about how you ended up as a photographer. Your body of work is marked by a certain richness of expression and is also rooted in our core ethos. In some sense, your photographs are a celebration of a way of life, of a way of seeing. Tell us about your journey and how has it been shaped?

Dinesh Khanna:The interesting thing is that both the points you are making — about what inspired me to be a photographer and the fact that I seem to be rooted in India — actually the opposite is true. I decided to look at things this way by deciding not to be a photographer. I decided to shoot India as an outsider because I felt I was an outsider. I live in Delhi and I used to work in advertising. But I realised that I actually knew verylittle of this vast country which was mine.I didn’t know much about large parts and aspects of India. So, I used photography to discover my country.

I didn’t want to be a photographer because my father was a photographer. He used to work with the American Embassy and used to be with SPAN magazine. I learnt my basics from him. While I was in school and college, I had access to a camera, to film. We had a dark room at home. My father used to encourage me to shoot and even to travel with the camera. So I used to go to places like Rishikesh and Haridwar to shoot. And this way I got into street photography and started loving it. However, when I was finishing college, I was very clear that I would not be a photographer. Though this had nothing to do with photography and my love for the medium. I thought that in India, due to the caste system, if someone’s father is a cobbler, the son becomes a cobbler. If the father is a tailor, the son has to become a tailor. The son is expected to take the family business or legacy forward. I think this is something that is fundamentally wrong with our social system. The caste system is still there and people still live according to its diktats. So, at the age of 19-20, I had told myself that I would not be a victim of this. Though it had nothing to do with how much I loved photography. Of course, I loved photography. The thing is thatI was not a very good student. Nor I was interested in studies. But I had gone to a very good college and well-known school. And that is another problem in our country: If you get the right labels in India and you are fluent in English, then it’sall okay. And this definitely worked for me. I feel that there is so much wrong that had been happening in India in terms of social and cultural discrimination. We must start breaking down the barriers and divisions. If we don't work on this, India will continue to be what it is and not be able to make our society more fair and equal.

Anyway, I drifted into advertising after college, in spite of my rather poor grades, and ended up spending 11 years in the business. And I must say, I really enjoyed the profession. Also, fortunately for me, I did really well. I worked in agencies like Clarion, Lintas and Enterprise. In my last advertising job at the rather young age of 28, I became the branch director of Enterprise. I started the agency’s branch in Delhi and ran it for five years. But, somewhere along the line, I realised that photography was my first love and I wanted to pursue it professionally. So, after about 10-11 years of advertising, I decided to be a photographer. In 1990, I quit advertising and took up photography as my profession. I started doing small assignments — product and people photography because I had to teach myself on the job as I had no training or experience at all. After a-year-and-a-half of doing small commercial assignments, I felt that the reason I wanted to be a photographer was not only to make a living and, even if it was to make a living, I did not want to just do advertising photography. For me, photography has been a means of expression, a way of looking at the world, of discovering what I am passionate about. I was also conscious of the fact that I was a typical metro kind of person and knew very little of how the rest of India, outside of cities like Delhi and Bombay lived their lives. And I wanted to discover this ‘Other India’ for myself. And the way I wanted to do that was through traveling and using photography as my means of ‘seeing. ’So, since I had a sense of what interested me, that’s what I started doing. I continued doing my commercial work, but whenever I had the money and time, I used to visit places like Pushkar, Benaras, Hyderabad, Kanchipuram and so many others. Whenever I would hear about a mela or a festival or anything interesting taking place in a city, I’d travel to that city, whether by road, train or air.

Through the 1990s, I travelled a lot and shot a lot. All over the country. Small villages, medium-sized towns and large cities. Melas, festivals and bazaars. Mosques and mandirs and gurdwaras and monasteries. I was interested in exploring and photographing all of them. But all this was without any particular project or subject in mind. I was totally fascinated by everything I saw through my camera and in love with all the new and wonderful discoveries I was making about my own country. The colour, the textures, the people, the architecture, the festivities all attracted me, but amidst all this it was the individual and her relationship with her milieu and surroundings which I tried to capture as a photographer. I had my first solo exhibition in 1996 in Mumbai. Then, in Delhi, in 1997. I never thought I was ready for a solo, but Prabuddha Dasgupta, who was not just a friend but also my mentor, insisted that I did a solo show at NCPA Mumbai’s Piramal Art Gallery. He spoke to the NCPA and they saw my work and agreed to the show. Interestingly, Prabuddha was part of the creative team that I worked with as part of Enterprise. While I was the branch director at Enterprise, he and Akash Das, (who is also a fashion photographer now), the art director, were the agency’s creative team. We were very good friends. My wife, Rachana, was also in advertising and worked with them in Everest earlier. We were like one large, happy family.

It so happened that David Davidar, the then MD of Penguin India, visited my show in IIC and asked me if I would be interested in doing a coffee table book. I, obviously, was ecstatic by his offer.When we were discussing the subject, I told him that I had been travelling for 10 years and would go back and look at my archives to see what I could put together for the book. It was then that I realised that what I had been doing instinctively was shooting the traditional bazaars of India and the myriad shades of its faith.The reason for it is that I was so fascinated by the other India that I wanted to explore and discover it. And that’s what I had been doing with my camera during that decade of regular travel. India is very open and always has been. Our commerce is in the open and our faith is also practiced out in the open. Temples are in the street corners, people pray, offer namaz or have gurudwara’s langar in public places. There is no constraint. So,I went back to David and told him about these 2 themes, about the Bazaar and Faith, I had unconsciously been shooting and following with my personal photographic exploration. Fortunately he and Bena Sareen, the chief designer, thought that both the ideas were very interesting and they would like to do 2 books and not just one! And so ‘Bazaar’ was published by Penguin in 2001 and ‘Living Faith’ in 2004.

Photos by Dinesh Khanna, Varanasi

During the analog period, photography was a somewhat restricted medium. Opportunities were few and only the rich or the professionals could afford to indulge themselves. However, since the time it went digital, it’s been much easier, and cheaper, to shoot photos.To my mind, the Internet and the ease to share photos and reach thousands of people is as significant a difference that has come to photography as the ease of takingphotographs with digital cameras. The photographic film was a very tough taskmaster; one needed to understand the chemistry and physics of photographyand, additionally, be sensitive to the moods of light.So, one was forced to learn photography as a craft,and while you did so, you also sharpened your vision.With digital, that unfortunately is not quite the case.With film, it took us a few years to work on a project, both because film was expensive to use and difficult to master. And the opportunities to share your work were severely limited as one could only share physical prints with a limited number of people. But now things are different. Now, even a DSLR has a Wi-Fi and you can very easily and quickly post andshare your images on social media. And if one is not careful, and inspired, digital can make one visually lazy as there is very little rigour required to learn the craft. Or so it would seem. Social media has, seemingly, given us the power to ‘publish’ our work and share it with the world without any constraints. Or restraint. I am very active on Facebook and Instagram myself. But more to inform, share and strike up conversations about photos and photography and not with the misconceived perception that my work is published. Today, curiously, too many people think that they are a photographer simply because they own a camera. It’s like saying that everyone who has a pen is a writer.

The second edition of Serendipity Arts Festival, held in Panjim in December 2017, saw Dinesh Khanna curate Nature Untamed: An Exhibition of Africa’s Wildlife (above), as captured by Anup Shah and A Slow Violence: Stories from the Largest River Basin in the World, which focused on stories of personal and ecological loss from the Ganga-Brahamputra basin — the largest river basin in the world.

However, there is a lot more to photography than just pointing a camera and shooting a bunch of pictures. Today, it is true, that your camera and software can ensure that almost every photo taken is a competent one. You do not really need to learn the craft with the same rigour as one did with film. But to be a photographer one must be born with the ‘eye’ and visual sensitivity. It’s a natural gift that only some of us have. But that is only the start. Much like the natural ability to sing or dance or draw. Only some of us are gifted with these talents. But these need polishing. One might be born with the eye for the visual, but it needs to be honed and sharpened and evolved. One has to do ‘riyaaz’ (rigorous practice) regularly and constantly to develop ones photography and truly excel in it. Anyone who is really interested in pursuing photography has to be sensitive to this point or else run the danger of drowning in the tsunami of images that we are inundated with across mainline and social media on a daily basis. Which, incidentally, is a big reason why most people can’t seem to distinguish between fantastic photographs and the mundane stuff.

Photo by Dinesh Khanna from the Faith series: Golden Temple, Amritsar

Nawaid Anjum: With the change in technology, how do you choose a particular angle?How do you sort of approach a frame? Do you think of composition? How do you visualize?

Dinesh Khanna: I prefer to do my photography instinctively. You are blessed if you are born with the visual talent, but over the years, you also collect a lot of experiences and see what’s interesting in terms of angles, compositions, light...how light works on certain things...how expressions on human faces work...how people interact with each other. I usually tell my students: Do not shoot all the time, but watch all the time. Observe all the time. And store things in that hard disc, called the human brain, where you are not consciously referring to it every time you're shooting, but unconsciously your mind is making those connections. And you’ll find that the work of photographers who are able to do that, is more mature and more evolved because they find that connection, that moment, that instant in which everything falls in place; it’s just very different. My only effort is to not think too much, but to respond emotionally when I am doing my personal work.But I also do a lot of commercial work where I really enjoy working with the team. There is an art director or a client. I have to look at their objective. Why do they want to make the photos? What will happen to the photos? What message would be derived out of it? And what response are they looking for? I find that very challenging too. In my personal work, I work alone. But, in my commercial work, I want to work with an art director. I like to work with a food stylist. I want to work with a chef. My commercial work is lot of thinking and planning — debate, discussion, decision-making, problem-solution. An entirely rational exercise. Whereas, my personal work is, relatively, straight from the heart.

When it comes to commercial work you’re there because someone has seen your work and thinks that you fit their requirement for that assignment. So, there is a certain expectation on the part of the team, which has got you there. And, therefore, it is best to follow your instinct and your distinctive style rather than trying to be like someone else. Commercial work requires you to be a team player. It’s marvelous to be able to spend a day or two with people who are talented so that you actually inspire each other, feed off each other.

Nawaid Anjum: Your initiative with Prashant Panjiar, the Delhi Photo Festival, has created an ecosystem and has been nurturing good photography. Tell us about your objectives of and the underlying vision behind the festival.

Dinesh Khanna: Prashant and I set up Nazar Foundation with the objective of promoting photography as an art form. This was in 2009. The first edition of Delhi Photo Festival happened two years later in 2011. Prashant and I had done a show together at Pallette Art Gallery. Interestingly, the subject was spirituality: he’d shot Khumbh Mela in B&W and I had been shooting the same subject in colour for years. Interestingly, Prashant has been a photojournalist and I’m into commercial photography. Both of us think very differently about photography: we don’t see eye-to-eye a lot of the time, which is probably the reason why as a partnership it has worked. There’s friction, there’s disagreement, but between us there is mutual respect on different points. There’s absolutely no ego.

When we started Nazar Foundation, we had not thought of doing the festival. We started doing “Nazar ka Adda” and workshops and created an environment which young photographers would find more enriching and inspiring. Also, in 2010, both of us were in our mid-fifties. You’ve lived your life with photography at its very core and you’ve got so much from it. So there comes a time when you want to give back to photography and that has been our motivation for starting Delhi Photo Festival.

Photo by Dinesh Khanna from the Faith series: Pushkar, Rajasthan

World over, many countries, and most of the important cities have a photo festival. And many younger photographers were asking us the question why India, which is one of the leading nations of the world, does not have an international photo festival. So, we took it as a challenge and fortunately India Habitat Centre (IHC) loved the idea and offered to be the host. We started with the idea that it will provide a platform for the best of contemporary international work. And by international we didn’t mean to exclude India, but include any work that was good and happening at that time for the audience in India. That remains our objective. In terms of format, the festival was largely theme-based though there is a debate about it today that may be we’re getting too locked in by having one theme as it becomes repetitive but thats been a learning which we will keep in mind while curating future editions. Besides the theme-based print exhibition we have artists’ talks, where we invite photographers to come and talk about their journeys and experiences. To actually have someone who you really admire, whether they live in New York or Japan or Bangalore, to come and talk about their body of work. There are portfolio reviews where photographers who are idolised can come and look at your work and give you feedback and direction. So, this really has been the core of the festival. Print exhibitions, artist talks, portfolio reviews and the digital slide shows. The objective of the festival is to make it a very immersive experience and give photographers the opportunity to not just view the final work but to understand the creative process and the inspirations behind them.

Nawaid Anjum: Tell us about your association with Serendipity Arts Festival where you curated shows at its two editions. There is greater thrust now on the intermingling of different arts; the boundaries are blurring, what is photography can also be literature and what is music can also be something else.

Dinesh Khanna: Photography is a small, but significant, part of the Serendipity environment. The festival has seven different artforms — photography, craft, visual arts, theatre, dance, music and culinary arts. The construct is that there are two curators per art form.Last year, which saw the first edition of the festival, and this year, Prashant and I are the photography curators. Interestingly, in this case unlike in DPF, we are independent curators. This is a chance for Prashant to do what he thinks and for me to bring the kind of photography that I am inspired by. It is great because we look at photography differently and this way we bring very diverse kind of work to the festival audience. I do think that art — and that includes photography over the last few years — has somehow trapped itself into thinking that good art is art which is about serious subjects. Good art is only something that has a social conscience and wants to save the world. I think that is too restrictive. I rebel against this definition. And that is because art is about the individual’s desire to express herself about any subject and that can be about something that causes you angst or it can be about the beauty of something that you see or imagine. A great artist is not just one who expresses about serious subjects, but one who expresses seriously about the subject she engages with.My curation for Serendipity Arts Festival is a reflection of this belief. One of the shows that I did last time at the Serendipity Arts Festival was called “The Essentials”.Its idea sprang from the basic needs of a human being.Usually such a subject is done with a very documentary approach and focuses on the lack of proper food, clothing and housing for people. However, I wanted to explore the fact that these subjects are also worked on by photographers who have a very different approach. Who look at the human engagement with these subjects but from the aesthetic and artistic point of view and not just that of deprivation? How would you look at the works of Tarun Khiwal, a fashion photographer, who expresses about clothes or Bharath Ramamrutham, who is a wonderful architectural photographer? Hence, the show of “Essentials”, of roti, kapda and makaan, Tarun did the kapda (clothes), Bharat covered makaan (shelter) and Gopika Chowfla created roti (bread).Gopika is not even a photographer. She’s a graphic designer who does a lot of work on food. And she did a marvelous job and she took the photos herself. Also, I felt that there are other genres of photography, for instance, street photography and portraiture, which are not given enough importance, especially byfestivals and galleries, but they are extremely popular both with photographers and the general public. So, one of the shows that I curated was with street photography. I feel that in India, especially amongst art/gallery/festival photographers, the inspiration, if you call it that, has come from the West as far as portraiture is concerned. In the western style, portraits are largely static — no smiles, no expression. So, the question I was raising was: Is there such a thing as the Indian gaze? Do Indian photographers look at portraiture differently? It brought together the works of 30-35 different photographers. I deliberately went looking for different portraits done in different circumstances, in different styles, with different people.

A photo by Dinesh Khanna from Kissa Kursi Ka series.

Nawaid Anjum: How do you look at the contemporary photography scene?

Dinesh Khanna: The interesting thing about today’s digital photography is the ease and instant ability to create an image. The ability to take a photograph is instant; therefore, there is an exponential growth, an explosion in the use of photographic devices. To my mind, this is not photography. At best it’s about recording memories. The two are altogether different. Today, because it’s easy, you’ll click some 10 photos, which you may never look at again. So, we just make a memory. I’m not trying to belittle this. What I’m trying to say is that a lot of communication has become visual communication. And the photograph is the evidence as the memory of a lived experience. That is something people get confused with. These photos should not be confused with photography as an art form. This is the difference. But since photography has become easy and widespread due to social media and the Internet, there is confusionin the people’s mind and in the photographer’s mind too. So, how do we separate the two? Galleries and festivals have to play a very important role in this by showing photographic works that are created with the intent of using photography as a means of expression.

Photos by Dinesh Khanna from Bazaar series

Nawaid Anjum: How important to you is the equipment? Which camera do you use?As an artist, how do you interact with the wider world?

Dinesh Khanna: The most important photographic equipment is the one we are born with. The mind. And our eyes. It’s how we use them to engage with the world around us that makes for the best and most impactful photographs. Then, of course, there is the hardware – cameras and lenses, and in today’s world, the software, which helps us record and enhance our vision exactly the way we want to see our images. We have to constantly hone, sharpen and upgrade all these — the organic and the technological tools we employ for our photography. Regarding the cameras that I use, for the last decade or so, for my commercial assignments, I have been shooting with the Canon range but have very recently switched to the Nikon D850 as its taken a huge leap in quality. I also love using the Fujifilm X-T1 mirrorless camera, as it’s small and light and perfect for street photography. However, my constant companion camera is the iPhone. In his book The Best Camera Is The One That's With You, American photographer Chase Jarvisreimagines, examines, and redefines the intersection of art and popular culture through images shot with his iPhone.I love using cellphones to take photos. I shoot constantly and obsessively with it and even post a number of photos on Instagram and Facebook through the day.

A photo either records a memory or gives expression to something. For example,I have been working on this series called “Kissa Kursi Ka” wherein I have been shooting portraits of chairs with my iPhone. These chairs (kursis) are the ordinary ones you see on the street and at times they are just abandoned. The idea for this series is based on a Hindi satirical film, of the same title, which came in the 60s or 70s and was about how the ‘kursi’ signified political power and that politicians clung to them so that they could misuse the power for ulterior motives and personal gain. Compared to that the ordinary kursi of the Aam Aadmi (the common man) just lies around broken and uncared for much like the person who uses it and this is in sharp contrast to the pomp and grandeur of the political chair.

I also click photos of my dogs and post them online because they are doing something funny and I want to share that. I have an album on Facebook called, “Hira, Moti and Thumki ki kahani” named after my dogs. A lot of people who are dog lovers follow it. I will not pretend that this is art.That is my memory- making, but ‘Kissa Kursi Ka’ is something that I’m expressing my point of view with.That, for me, is serious photography.

As an artist, you ought to be concerned with what is happening around you. You normally are.You’re hopefully a sensitive person at heart; you do look at causes, worry/wonder about things and there would be some kind of yardstick that you use to express your point of view not just for what’s wrong with the world but about subjects and circumstances that touch you. I think an artist hastheresponsibility to make their work based on something that has to do with human relations or human experience. At the end of the day, that’s what we are. As an artiste, I use my artform to share my aesthetics as well as express my concerns.

Nawaid Anjum: How do you look at your early work and some of your recent work? How do you view this transition, this evolution? Have you found new ways of looking at things?

Dinesh Khanna: One big difference is that earlier, I didn’t have the experiences to see beyond myself. Lately,I have come to realise that your cumulative experiences and knowledge subconsciously get processed in your work — your points of view, your belief system. To my mind, the evolution or maturity of any human being has to do with that rather than age. The more sensitive and sensible you are, the more you’ll be able to see and observe. For me, it’s very important not to be judgmental about things, but to be observant. That’s why I take pride in being a photographer. Which is why I observe. Today, politically, the fact that people on both the right and left side don’t seem to understand is that they need to understand each other. Only then will there be a debate and some meeting ground.

Photos by Dinesh Khanna from Rashtrapati Bhavan series

Nawaid Anjum: Tell us about some of the stuff you are currently working on.

Dinesh Khanna: I have been working on a project on Benaras for the last 8-10 years, so I keep going there. That’s one book that I want to self-publish. Benaras is like a microcosm of India. All that is good about India is in Benaras and all that is bad about India is also in this city. It might be the largest pilgrim centre in India, but it’s also a city; people live there. There’s an everydayness also to this eternal city, beneath the exotic and the divine, which is what I’m looking at and it’s something that fascinates me greatly.

Secondly, there’s an organisation called Sahapedia. It’s a trust run by the Tatas and I’ve done these two books on the Rashtrapati Bhavan— President's Bodyguard and the Life in Rashtrapati Bhavan — with them last year.I am involved with them now as a visual consultant and am curating photo essays for them, wherein photography is used to depict culture, history and heritage. There are very few such prestigious platforms for photographers and Sahapedia: Frames is an excellent place for them to showcase their work. Also, over time, this will become a rich and diverse archive of visual stories about festivals, customs, traditions, architecture, habitats, cuisine, costumes and everything else that makes Indian life special and different.

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