There There records and remembers where we were and shows where the studio photographer thought we would rather be. There There records both what we look like and the mechanism of being seen.
As the collection grows, the distinction between the exotic and the everyday, ‘home’ and elsewhere, becomes more and more confusing. The backdrop in Jaipur is ‘Agra’ and its Taj Mahal. The backdrop in Toronto is ‘Italy’. Everywhere are mottled backdrops of non-descript swishes and swirls, a further leap into abstraction, presumably to signify an everywhere space of privilege and sophistication. Conversely, the photographers’ studio in Delhi looks like New York City, the one in Washington DC looks like the one in Honolulu. The only difference seems to be the degree of material clutter in the photographer’s studios.
While both the differences and similarities demonstrate the evermore-powerful hegemonic system of worth, the places and especially the people do not conform to the theres of picture postcards. Instead, the growing collection documents moments where ordinary people pause to look at each other. We see both an unsettling encounter with official worldviews and an estrangement from such hegemonic sights. The pictures show the space between the there of conquest and the there where ordinary people live, work and die.
Endnotes
i Cited in Alcalay, Ammiel. 1993. After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 66.
ii Ibid. p.67
iii Ibid. p.65-6.
iv Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ibid. p.65-6.
v Urry, John, 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Routledge.
Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma
2005