This Thursday, November 10 opens the largest and most prestigious fair in the world in the photographic field. At the ephemeral Grand Palais, Paris Photo welcomes this year 134 galleries from 29 countries, including two South Africans and one Tunisian. Nature morte, based in New Delhi, the only gallery from the Indian subcontinent, shows the very demanding and surprising work of Indian photographer Bharat Sikka around masculinity, the Indian man and gender. Maintenance.
RFI : Where and when did you take this photo showing a person putting a piece of watermelon in another person’s mouth ?
Bharat Sikka : I took this image in New Delhi, 2021. The person on the left is Pinky, and the person on the right is Robertson. They live together, in the south of New Delhi, in Kirki Village, that’s where I took the photo. The two people are not defined by their gender, so the person on the left is not a woman. They share their life and when I was at their house, I witnessed this situation, so I asked them to rehearse the scene for me. It was a very intimate moment between two people.
The son of a soldier, you were born in 1973, in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India. One of the subjects that is close to your heart is “ the indian man “. In one image, we see a naked person behind a curtain. What can we find out about the Indian man through this photo ?
indian man was my first project when I started photography. At the time, I spoke about male identity in India, especially youth, sexuality and gender. For this photo, I first spent ten days with the person, and at the end I made a photo book on him. Three or four years later, I made this image.
You work a lot on the transformation of society in India. Would it have been possible to take such a photo thirty years ago, when you started your career as a photographer ?
No, definitely not. When I started this project, it was much more difficult to talk about this subject, not only compared to the situation in India, but, at the time, these people were not able to express themselves openly and let me take these pictures.
The most spectacular photo that you show here in Paris Photo shows the head of a man, hidden behind a very flamboyant and threatening red mask, because it is full of inverted thumbtacks.
He is a graphic designer met in Goa. He showed me his work which greatly intrigued me. Many of these photos exhibited here are collaborations, and this one in particular. I was very surprised by some masks he made. He is a very nice man, but when he wears this mask, he appears rather repulsive. And I really like this tension between the two. And it was his idea to put on the mask.
Whether you’re portraying a person in a nude pose or staging a pristine landscape in Kashmir, each time the viewer feels tension, but you’re never overtly political. At the heart of your work is always the human being. Looking back on your work over the past 30 years, do you feel you have accompanied the social evolution of the debate on male identity and gender in India ?
I think a certain part of my work has become political. Indian society has reached a stage where all middle-class and upper-middle-class people are exploring their identity. And they speak to the people of conservative India. And each person tries to express their feelings and say who they are. Each person tries to address the world around. At the same time, this desire is suppressed by this very repressive society in which we live today. So these photos can help to establish a dialogue between the two sides. It is a bridge, a challenge, for Indian society to perceive this reality.
Your work is admired and bought in Europe, because you give us access to a reality of life in India that is not normally available to us. How Indian audiences react to your work ?
My work is niche, absolutely not mainstream. The audience is very small. In India, I can show these photos in private galleries or in very private places. It’s not really a work that is shown publicly, except in social networks.
As an artist, you have been inspired a lot by cinema and painting, for example painters like Edward Hopper. What kind of photographers have inspired you ?
The visual roots of my photography are mainly in cinema and painting. In the context of photography, there are many photographers who have inspired me. At the beginning of my career, there was, for example, the American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia [né en 1953, connu pour ses images oscillant entre documentaire et fiction, NDLR]. I also really like Dayanita Singh [née en 1961 à New Delhi, elle est devenue célèbre pour son travail sur les familles de la classe moyenne et ses « photos-objets », NDLR] and his way of transforming his photos into books.
Another very amazing photo shows a hand with six fingers. An image that is both very pure and very disturbing.
Most of the images exhibited here at Paris Photo revolve around the question of identity. Here, it is a collaboration with an artist who makes prostheses. She added a finger to this hand, so we see a hand with six fingers. Instead of making a “normal” portrait of her, I took a photo of her hand with an extra finger to express her way of seeing the world. In addition, she loves this morbid, organic side…
► Bharat Sikka’s personal exhibition is presented at Paris Photographyfrom November 10 to 13, by the gallery Still lifebased in New Delhi.