False Truths & Fragile Documents: Inside Vani Bhushan’s Image-Making Practice

Part documentation and part creative invention is an interesting way to think about all photography; the documentation end is a limitation built into the tool. Mine, I describe as a practice in practicality; of living, as you refer to it, in a post-truth society, and trying to decipher the instability of media languages through what I know most: the camera. 

I have an unresolved relationship with the word document; ‘document’ has been overused, it has been attributed a flatness, both formally and conceptually. That does not appeal to me. I also do not hold the work in conversation with documentary photography — while it may borrow language, borrowed with the purpose of addressing subjectivity within the act of picture making. The work is of a different world. 

The best way to answer this would be to speak of one of the images that was hardest to make (see the image below); I made this image repeatedly, on various days, over and over again; a rehearsal, a practice; made on the view camera, never knowing what I had till I developed my film when I returned to school (it is almost impossible to develop film in India, good chemistry is not sold here) — two months after the image was made: whilst titled ‘untitled’, I describe it as ‘the moment before my camera is taken away from me’; a photograph made on 400 ISO film, that a) would be impossible to retrieve in situation my camera was actually taken away from me if I were a female photojournalist, given the fragility of film and the unpredictability of how the feminine form is treated in New Delhi  b) is an assessment (or one might say, snapshot [snapshot = proof] — but I do not like that term) of position, gaze(s) and vulnerability the moment before my camera is taken away from me. The surface of this image also holds interesting information; the only part of the image that is in focus is the policeman in the background, while he is being engulfed by fog.

I think absence might be key here; erasure too — Waiting on Images That Won’t Appear hinges on erasure — to use the camera to work against its own indexicality, erase image as it is made. To answer your question as directly as I am permitted to, in our world today, the work is partially about the histories of photography and the camera; but also about applying the tool to predict the future. 

I am enjoying your use of the word uncertainty. My photographic decisions (using a 4x5 view camera, and the 35mm camera with a shutter drag) are so that I never fully know what the picture will look like; also, using film, it is a conduit for latency. Photojournalism (other than advertising) is the only form of photography that comes with a prescribed audience, so I’m constantly thinking of audiences — not the audience that looks at my work, but Audience with a capital A. This becomes interesting when the work is viewed on a gallery wall; I’m met with excitement when they realise it’s staged; I’ve only ever once had someone who was deeply annoyed. But that helps the work grow.