PHOTOGRAPHY ON FILM ~ An Interview with David Macdougall	Print
			INTRODUCTION Whilst there is a literature on the ethnography of photography a surprisingly small amount of such work is represented in ethnographic film. David and Judith MacDougall's film, PHOTO WALLAHS, stands out as an example of the potential that film holds for the representation of an anthropology of photography. As ethnographic film PHOTO WALLAHS is situated within a genre of 'observational' documentary film. The film is not narrated, thus within the filmic text the voices of the film's subjects do not give way to the authoritative voice-over of the ethnographer. More specifically PHOTO WALLAHS pertains to the collective work of the MacDougalls. In this sense it is an expression of their interests, experience and experimentation in the development of their own styles. Contextualised as such PHOTO WALLAHS has been measured with respect to some of the expectations placed on ethnographic films. It has been discussed in the terms of a critical discourse on film styles and ethnographic representation. For instance, Narayan has suggested that PHOTO WALLAHS cannot stand alone: 'cultural translation is at stake when an ethnographer altogether steps down from an overtly interpretative role'. Narayan found that American viewers experienced confusion which was only resolved by Narayan's own 'impromptu voice-overs' (Narayan 1994: 951). Sarah Pink found a more varied response when she screened the film to an audience of second year sociology students. In this teaching context the film was introduced as a film about photography in India. Those students who criticised the film complained that they could not find a 'structure' or 'story' in it. However, those students who engaged with its subject (either 'India' or 'photography') described it in terms such as 'interesting', 'really enjoyable'. Others found it 'representative': '...it really was like that in India'. On other occasions that we have seen PHOTO WALLAHS it was introduced by David MacDougall. Moreover, the growing number of interviews, articles and reviews which are being published about the film and the work of the MacDougalls indicates that the film should not have to stand alone. Any text is necessarily incomplete and the anthropological value of ethnographic films is surely enhanced by a contextualising voice or document. However, the extent to which a film appears 'complete' depends very much on the agenda of each subjective viewer. Whilst an acknowledgement of the filmic nature of PHOTO WALLAHS is essential to our understanding, the present focus is on the subject that the film explores. Film is in a sense always about film. This particular film raises some interesting issues since its own composition depends on a contrast between moving and still images. David MacDougall has described his treatment of these layers of filmic and photographic representation in the film: 'In one respect the film treats photography as just another topic of documentary. We didn't want to become too precious about representing representation, as though in some kind of intellectual hall of mirrors. But on the other hand we did want to draw some distinctions and parallels between painting, clothing, photography, television and film' (MacDougall 1992: 97). PHOTO WALLAHS represents an ethnography, rather than a theory of photographic practice. Ironically it appears that because it is an ethnographic film PHOTO WALLAHS has tended to be theorised by ethnographic film theorists rather than photography theorists. Recent interviews and reviews treat PHOTO WALLAHS as a 'Film about Photography' rather than directing the inquiry towards the photography that the film is about (eg. MacDougall 1992; Narayan 1994). We wanted to change this emphasis by asking David MacDougall some questions about the photographers, photographs, the potential of film for the representation of photography, and the implications for photographic theory. Thus we hope to situate the film to explore its implications for discourses on social uses of photography, photographers as cultural producers, colonial photography, photography theory, and fieldwork about photography and photographers. The film is a rich and provoking account how photography is made meaningful in Mussoorie: its anthropological value stretches far beyond the world of ethnographic film. Angela Major and Eleanor Brunner interviewed David MacDougall in Manchester in November 1994. Below the interview is divided into sections to link PHOTO WALLAHS and MacDougall's ideas about anthropology, film and photography to issues explored in this volume. Sarah Pink and Angela Major THE INTERVIEW First we asked David where the inspiration for the film originated: The idea for the film originated in a fascination with looking at old photographs, and in particular the sense one has of presence and absence: the very strong illusion of the presence of a person combined with the absence of the person. We thought for a while of calling the film MISSING PERSONS because in every photograph there is a missing person: the person isn't there. That, I suppose, was combined with reading about photography, perhaps most importantly [Roland] Barthes' CAMERA LUCIDA. We had several ideas for possible films about photography. One was simply to take a group of "found photographs" -- or you could call them "lost photographs"-- the kind of pictures one finds in junk shops and second hand shops. In the same way that the people are missing from photographs, photographs themselves seem to go missing. You find them in the strangest places and you wonder how it was possible that things with such personal associations could go astray. Where do they come from? And how do they end up lost? The idea was to take a group of unknown photographs and make a film about trying to trace them back to their origins. What could we learn from the evidence of the photograph itself, about its place, time and nationality? And what also from other bits of evidence? Perhaps there would be a studio's or a photographer's printed name, or a city. Would it perhaps be possible to find the original owners of the images and find out who was in them? It would be a kind of detective story. That's a film I should like to make some day. Another idea had much more to do with trying to place photography within a particular social context. We thought it might be possible to make a film about a single photographer in a small town or village. The film would look at the kinds of pictures made, who they were made for, what occasions they were made for, how the photographer fulfilled certain needs within the community among the clients, and also who the clients were. When we were in India several people suggested that it would be a good place to make a film about photography because photography has a very long history there. Almost as soon as photography was invented it was taken up in India -- initially by some of the royal families as a hobby, but then very quickly photographic studios started appearing in the major cities. There was even a photographic studio (I think in Calcutta) operated entirely by women in the 1850s and 60s, catering to women clients who often couldn't be photographed or seen publicly but who still wanted photographs. In many ways PHOTO WALLAHS was an unusual film for us to have made, and in many ways it was an experiment. We first became interested in some general problems concerning photography through looking at photographs, and through reading. The idea of making the film in India only came later. It is a film that was driven by an interest in some things that are abstract about photography and other things that are personal, and it was an experiment for several reasons. First, we were taking a cultural artifact as the starting point rather than starting with people. Second, we wanted to structure the film around a series of ideas about photographic meaning rather than around a chronological narrative or a didactic process. Nor did we want to focus the film on one personality. So it really was an experiment to see how far we could go with that agenda and whether it would be possible to deal with photography in that way. Q: To what extent did the inspiration for the film derive from contemporary debates about colonial photography? Oh, I think it certainly came partly from those debates. One interesting aspect of photography has been its role in colonisation and its other political uses. There is an element of the film that touches on that, and it was certainly part of the background: the way in which photography has been interpreted in various societies and how it has been used as a social instrument. We had thought that some of these things might come out if we confined the film to a very narrow focus and tried to work on the relationship between one photographer and one community. In fact we never found that situation in India. It seemed that if there was a photographer in a town, and the town was of a certain size, there would very likely be many more as well. But below a certain size there would be no photographers in the community and people would go to the neighbouring town if they wanted photographs taken. There were sometimes itinerant photographers who would move around from village to village, but that situation did not present itself to us either. Instead we began to cast our net a little more broadly, to think more about other possibilities. We travelled a bit in southern Rajasthan and in Gujarat. We went to a town called Mount Abu, which is one of the more isolated hill stations, and we were interested to see there for the first time commercial photographers who dressed tourists up in costumes and photographed them at "beauty spots" with attractive landscapes behind them. We were interested in the kinds of costumes that were being used: what did they represent, what functions did they fulfill, what did people think of this, and what was the relationship between photography and tourism? Q: Why India? We ended up filming in India because we had gone to a conference on ethnographic film in Jodhpur in 1987 and a number of people we met there said, "Why not make the film in India? It has a very old tradition of photography and there are all sorts of photography being practised." Another aspect of photography that interested us was what happens when photography is something new. We were interested in the idea of the photographic revolution in peoples' consciousness. If one could go back to the 1840s and 50s, what was it like to see photographs for the first time, to be photographed? In India today there were many people who had never been photographed or who had been photographed only once in their life, and it seemed that here was the possibility of seeing a society in which there was both a long photographic tradition and yet in which, for some people, photography had not lost its freshness. I'm not sure the film bears that out but it was part of our original interest. Q: Some of the formal photographs taken in studios, especially those of couples sitting very straight with unsmiling faces, were reminiscent of the Victorian photography that the woman [Princess Sita of Kapurthala] was showing in a previous scene. Do you draw any parallels between this contemporary Mussoorie style and Western photography during the colonial era? Yes, there are some similarities, but initially, when we went to Mount Abu and saw the tourist photography, we began to think of photography as existing on many levels and became interested in looking at it in a complex situation. Then it was suggested to us by the director of the Indian non-government organisation hosting our project that we should go to Mussoorie in the foothills of the Himalayas. Mussoorie was established initially by English administrators and bureaucrats who wanted a place to go hunting and to spend the hottest months away from the plains. Very soon Indian families started coming here, rich Indian families, and in the 1840s and 50s villas were built by both the British and the princely families. Eventually it became a tourist destination for colonial families wanting to get away from the heat of the plains for a few days. During the First and Second World Wars it was a place of rest and recreation for soldiers on leave. It was always a bit more informal, people say, than Simla, which was the summer headquarters of the government of the colonial administration, but there were nevertheless a lot of parallels with Simla and other hill stations. When we first went there in 1988 it was still a tourist destination but one almost entirely for middle class Indian tourists. We saw very few Westerners, but you could see the layerings of history in both the architecture and in the people. It is a very polyglot community. There are people there from the local region, the Garhwal hills, and people who have moved up from the plains, and there are refugees of all sorts, and descendants of refugees. There is a big Tibetan community. There are a lot of Nepalis, some of whom are migrant labourers but others who live there permanently. There are many people who came after Partition from Punjab in what is now Pakistan. There is also the old heritage of the British presence. So there is an incredible mixing, and each of these historical and cultural layers seems to have produced a layer of photography. And those layers of photography are also linked to different technologies. We found it a very interesting and complex place, and we saw photography as one way of understanding its history and social structure. Q: Bearing that social structure in mind, what is the position of the photographer in relation to the subject, the photographee? How do their social positions become effective in this relationship ? The photographers come from different social backgrounds. A lot of them seem to have started out as painters and to have moved into photography as an extension of painting. So you could say that some of them come from the artisan castes that produce painters. Others seem to have got into it by accident one way or another, particularly the current group of what are called "outdoor" photographers, the ones who photograph tourists and visitors. This occurred almost as an extension of tourism. People who found themselves in a backwater of tourism just started taking pictures as a quick way of making money. Q: Did they carry any esteem with them for being a photographer? Did this depend on what sort of photography they practised? Certainly the old photographers who operate studios and who began a long time ago, like the photographers of Doon Studio, feel that they are part of a photographic tradition. The grandfather of the photographer who is seen in the film tinting photographs was trained while working for Bourne & Shepherd, one of the important 19th century photographic companies, with studios all over India. He is a high caste person as well, from a Brahmin family. I think each stratum of photography in Mussoorie has a starting point in a particular period of history. The studio photographers began in the 19th century. There is a newer group of studio photographers who began somewhat later and who have a different clientele, generally a less well-off clientele, for example the photographer who does only black and white photography. Many of his clients come from the area surrounding Mussoorie. They are poorer people, farmers and working class people. The "outdoor" photographers who take pictures of tourists represent a newer phase and use a different technology. They use modern cameras. And in addition to that you have the remnants of itinerant photographers who use a different technology again, box cameras and paper negatives. And of course you also have in a sense the newest generation of photographers who are ordinary middle class Indians who take their own pictures. They buy inexpensive cameras and take snapshots. That is a fairly new phenomenon, because cheap cameras didn't become available in India until recently, and until very recently the custom for middle class people was to go to a professional photographer. Although photography is now quite accessible it still must be something special to possess a photograph of someone. And until recently photography was even more special because you went to a photographer for a reason, on a particular occasion. It might be your birthday, it might be a wedding, it might be an annual event. Whereas snapshot photography has a very different atmosphere about it, it is anecdotal, it is based upon the home rather than the studio, it is connected with travel. And of course you do it yourself, which is the biggest difference. Q: At one point in the film a young chap is saying it is now the "video age". Is this something you think is realistic, or is it still pretty much in the background? Video is becoming very important in India and in many other countries. In some ways it has made a much bigger impact in developing countries than in Europe or North America. For example in Indonesia video is everywhere and is used to document important family events, and that's true in India as well. It is interesting that the practitioners are very young people like that boy in the film. Many of the people who make videos of weddings and birthday parties and other events are very young -- their parents are probably in the electronics business in one way or another. They may sell television sets or have appliance shops. The video makers are their children and of their children's generation. When the boy says, "This is now the video age," it is true to the extent that video is now beginning to replace still photography at a lot of family functions. Q: Are the video-makers trying to fit in the same slot as the photographers? Do they pose a threat to the existing photographers? I think each new kind of photography is to some degree a threat to the existing ones. The newer forms tend to take over some of the functions of the older forms. People who used to go to a studio to have a formal portrait made are satisfied now with a portrait made outdoors during a trip, or even photographs they take of each other with their own cameras. Video is obviously supplanting some of the functions of formal wedding photography and matrimonial photography. A lot of the old studios are having to shift their business into side-lines, since people no longer want formal photographs made. They get by through making passport pictures, and many of them have gone into side-lines like photocopying. They will buy a photocopier and it will be there in the studio. Half their business seems to come from people coming to have documents copied. Or they will act as agents for photo processing labs and take people's film and send it to the nearest lab and then return it and get a small commission out of that. So there is some encroachment on each other's territory. Q: How are these different types of photography related to the specific cultural meanings of the photographs ? One thing that interested us in particular was the question of whether there were important cultural differences in how people regarded photographs in India and say, inWestern Europe; whether this was linked to a particular stage in their history or whether it was linked more deeply to other cultural expectations and conventions. It did seem to us that, at least until very recently, the lines were blurred between photography and painting in India in a way that they aren't in many other countries. Let me put it another way, that people regarded photography as a way of producing images that had a kind of eternal truthfulness to them rather than images that were anecdotal and historical. If you don't have easy access to snapshot photography then photography is going to get channelled into a more formal situation to begin with, but then I think there is also a difference in attitude to what the function of the photograph is. Is the photograph there to record part of your history as a person, and different stages of that history, or is it there to produce something more enduring that stands for much more? I felt that in India the traditional formal portrait had attached to it much more a feeling of creating a single eternal image of the sitter than in the West. That difference is exaggerated when we start looking at snapshots in the West, which are full of accidents, informality, and catching people unawares. It seems much more important in India that you not be caught unawares. The making of the picture is something that was controlled both by the sitter and the photographer. That certainly has parallels with an earlier tradition of photography in Europe, so it remains to be seen how the globalisation of photography, particularly snapshot photography, will affect the way people regard photographs in India. Q: In some parts of the film the idea that photographs can be staged is invoked quite strongly. Did you see any parallels between the staging of photography and your staging of the film? I think one aspect of the film is the rather formal treatment of some of the self-presentations, when people speak in direct address to the camera and the filmmakers. The shots are rather formally framed, and that was intentional. It had partly to do with how people wanted to present themselves in certain controlled situations (which reflects some of the other aspects of Indian photography) and I think it also had something to do with the sense we had of making a film about photography and being very conscious of the frame -- perhaps in a different way from other films we have made. So I think there is a relationship between social conventions, the formality of the shooting, and the subject of photography itself. Q: How did the photographers react to you and your wife making the film? Initially the photographers were quite surprised that we wanted to make a film about this subject and about them. I think many of them had never really had anybody take them seriously as artists or as people whose work was worthy of being studied. It took a while for them to accept that we took photography, and their views about what they were doing, seriously. They may well have been serious about it themselves, they may have talked seriously to other photographers, but they weren't used to outsiders taking the same interest. Q: Did the photographers want to have an input in determining how they were portrayed in the film? The photographers never tried to direct us about how we should film them, but I think we were sensitive to how they expected to be filmed. They expected a certain formality in how they were presented. I think it was also partly a question of a professional relationship. They respected our professionalism just as we respected theirs. To have interfered with another photographer's method would have been seen as impolite and unprofessional. Q: Did the photographers choose the sorts of things they wanted to talk about? To some degree, but we definitely had our own agenda. We had things we wanted to ask them or have them describe. Some topics came up unexpectedly, but others we tried to press people on. One question we were interested in exploring was how photographers viewed the anecdotal qualities of photography as against its idealising qualities. We put a question to several photographers: If you had the choice of a beautifully painted portrait of a loved one -- perhaps a loved one who had died -- or a rather bad and fuzzy photograph, which would you prefer? We wanted to get at the question of the indexical dimension of photography, the physical relationship between the subject and the photograph. The question that we put was really to see how they regarded the question itself -- whether it made sense, and whether there was any strong feeling about the differences between photography and painting. We found that it was almost a non-question. It was a question that didn't ever get answered in the terms in which we were thinking about it. Often they answered that they would prefer the better of the two, the painting, but in discussing this issue the photographic process never really came up. Perhaps if we had asked it of younger photographers we would have got a different answer, but certainly the old studio photographers and many of the so-called "outdoor" photographers didn't find it an interesting question or one which made much sense. Q: Why was there no narration in the film? We haven't used much narration in our films and certainly we always try to avoid a didactic narration, which we think both separates the viewer from the subject and is also very restricting. It tends often to be authoritarian and to over-construct meanings. As this film was very much an attempt to open up meanings we didn't want it to be didactic. We also thought that having no guiding narration would force viewers to work a bit harder to make sense of how the film was structured and what its meanings might be. It would make them dig into the film more deeply. Q: In your final scene you have a sign saying, "If you wish to be seen on television, please stand here." Was that something that you had in mind from the beginning or did that come with time? That came up during the course of shooting andwas partly due to the fact that people were constantly asking to be in the film or asking us to take their pictures, often not understanding that we weren't using a still camera. We would explain that this was a film and that unfortunately if we photographed them there was no way we could give them a copy. They would often say, "It doesn't matter -- it would just be nice to be in it." We had the sense that at least in Mussoorie, many people were very conscious of photography and open to it. They liked photography and, contrary to reactions that we had seen in other parts of the world, photography didn't seem to pose a threat. In some societies there is the fear that photography will take something away from you, take part of your soul (in the various ways that's expressed) or make you ill. In India it seemed that people regarded photography as a more additive process -- it added something to you, it didn't take it away; and in fact it presented one more manifestation of yourself. It's easy to speculate why that might be. It may be related to Hindu religious belief and to the many manifestations of God. But in any case that sequence came partly from those requests, and we thought, "Well why not create another opportunity for people to be in the film." It also came out of our awareness that we were making a film about one photographic medium using another photographic medium, and although we didn't want to go into the relationships of film and photography at great length, because there simply wasn't space for that, we did want to raise some questions about the moving image as opposed to the still image. So the sequence created a still frame, but a still frame not of still photography but of motion photography. It was interesting to see that in the context of a film people came into that frame with very different sets of expectations and a different sense of what was expected of them. Instead of posing for the moment -- the instant of the still photograph -- they felt an obligation to perform in some way. Many people felt they had to do something, even if it was only to say "My name is so-and-so and I come from New Delhi. Thank you very much." Q: You mentioned that in the film itself you didn't want to dwell on the relationship between film and photography. We wanted to ask if you think that film is a particularly appropriate medium for the representation of anthropological information about photography? I think film is already a form of multi-media. It combines different ways of looking at things and uses different media, and that makes it a very flexible instrument for looking at something like photography, which is both a physical object and something of social significance. And of course the fact that film uses the same representational system, more or less, means that it is appropriate for reproducing photographs. The reason we didn't want to go extensively into the differences between film and photography was that there simply wasn't the space. There was so much to explore about photography itself in this setting that it would have been taking on too much. And it could also have become endlessly introverted to keep reflecting back on the actual filming of photography to the point of diminishing returns. We actually spent several days filming a Bombay film crew who were in Mussoorie making a police thriller. There were about 100 people, including the actors and crew. They were very nice and let us sit right behind their camera for a couple of days and film the way they were making the film. It's very interesting material to me but we finally felt it had no place in this film because it went too far afield. We really had to stick to still photography and we even had to exclude some forms of that. There was a photo journalist working there who supplied pictures to magazines, and there was another photographer who made very beautiful coffee table books of Indian scenes using large format transparencies and beautiful colour reproduction. We filmed him, but in the end we didn't use that material. Q: How was the film finally structured? This film presented an opportunity to work with a film editor, which we had rarely done before. So we asked Dai Vaughan if he would be interested. We ended up working very closely with Dai -- I think more closely than he was used to! Before he came we had already edited a lot of the sequences ourselves. Many of those we simply took apart and put back into the rushes. Others we kept. In some cases he liked them and said, "Lets keep it. Let's keep that sequence. We will modify it a little but basically it's good. Let's use it." I prepared a long list of thoughts and ideas and suggestions which I gave to Dai at the very beginning. A lot of it was ideas about photography, some of it was thoughts about sequences, some of it was how I thought the film could develop certain ideas. And of course we talked endlessly. At one point we had the idea of structuring the film much more explicitly as a series of chapters with chapter headings. In the end we decided not to do that, but the film is in fact structured around three main chapters plus an introduction at the beginning that throws up a lot of the themes that we develop in the film. We wanted the film to look at photography as a spectrum of possibilities, to show that photography could be anything from a medium of the imagination and fantasy to a medium of evidence, and everything in between. So the separate sections of the film try to develop these different aspects, starting with photography as a means of idealisation, with the old studio photographers creating ideal, eternal images of their sitters, through to the last section developing ideas about photography as a form of evidence. It became clear at a certain point in the editing that the climax of the film, where these alternatives are really tested, is in the sequence of matrimonial photography, because it is there that the crunch comes. The photograph has to be attractive: there is a certain degree of idealisation when you are sending a picture to a family to consider as a possible bride or husband. But on the other hand it has to be recognisable when you meet the person, and if it is too idealised it fails as evidence of what that person is like. This is put explicitly by Raja, the photographer, who says, "The picture was saying something ... but the person was not like that." And so, in a sense, the film moves towards that sequence. The things that are dealt with in the last section are some of the relationships between photography and death, photography as memory, but most importantly, photography as evidence. When photographs are shown on television of missing persons it may be essential, in order to identify them, or identify a dead body, that the photograph look like them. And then there's the use of photographs as identification symbols, or emblems. Passport photographs are almost like fingerprints or serial numbers. This whole area of the bureaucratization of photography, and the use of photography as a form of social control, dates back to colonial times. So the last section moves in different directions, all circling around the question of photography as evidence. I suppose there is also a coda to the film in the last sequence of self-presentations. Q: In what ways do you think that the film contributes to anthropological debates about photography? There is certainly a tradition of writing about photography as an exegesis: attempting to interpret photographs in very specific ways. What I have seen of anthropological writing about photography often takes that direction. At the same time there is another approach which is much more open and speculative. I think an essential difference between making a film about photography and writing about photography is that not only do you say different things but you say them in a different way. Film isn't very good in making an explicit kind of exegesis. It is much better at trying to create a network of relationships, and we felt that this film offered an opportunity for us to approach ethnographic film in a new way. This was to try to create the richest and most fertile body of material that we could, out of which a whole range of meanings could be derived. Therefore it was important not to close off possible connections but, in fact, to interrelate things as much as possible. We tried to suggest clusters of meaning, both in the way that we as outsiders could look at photographs and also as photographs are actually experienced by people. The idea was that there should be some relationship between the audience's experience of the film and the subject in broader terms. I think this will change the way in which we think about film in the future, because it suggests a different way to approach cultural meaning as a kind of "complex" rather than through a more linear kind of analysis. Q: Do you have any advice for anthropologists now wishing to begin research on the cultural significance of photography in other societies? I think it is a wide open subject. There is so much to be learned about the role that photography plays in different communities. I suppose I would advise people always to be looking for the ways in which photography merges with other kinds of representation and the place it occupies in what you might call the whole "representational environment" in which people live. This is an environment that includes pictures, signs, texts, costumes and decoration. I think that it is also important not to try to tie different practices of photography too specifically to different cultures, because that can be a real pitfall. Photography is such an international phenomenon that there are influences coming from everywhere, criss-crossing -- especially in a place like India which is so huge and has so many different conditions, so many levels of sophistication. It would be crazy to try to pin things down as being specifically "Indian" about Indian photographic practice. You can very often find exactly the same things elsewhere. You have to look for more general tendencies and also for things that might contradict your first conclusions. Somebody who writes very interestingly about photography is Christopher Pinney, and I think what's interesting about his writing is that he looks at photography both as a local and global phenomenon and tries to see where these cross. One could also talk about the possible uses of photography as a method of elicitation. Photographs don't just remind you of people, they remind you of events, they contain all sorts of meanings that people may be willing to talk about, provided their attention is drawn to those levels of meaning. So perhaps it's important for the anthropologist to try to develop with informants as sophisticated an understanding of photography as possible, so they are in a position to think in those terms, and so that they aren't simply trapped into being the naive "other" measured against our greater sophistication. That is both condescending and unrealistic and doesn't recognise what people may very well have to say.