Photography and Pedagogical Inquiries: Conversations with Rishi Singhal

As part of the Chennai Photo Biennale’s series of conversations reflecting on the practices of representation, Suchitra Vijayan spoke with photographer and educator Rishi Singhal on 29 April 2021. Questions around the role of documentation were foregrounded, along with attendant queries around critical inquiry and emulation. “Pedagogy is political,” asserts Vijayan, suggesting that Singhal—in his capacity as an educator—has a role in how knowledge is produced. Methodologies often percolate through generations, and the predatory gaze on the “common man” is a product of colonial documentary photography that served to underscore othering narratives. It has remained the norm in street photography in the postcolonial landscape as well. This, in contemporary iterations of contestable power, invites questions around consent and the delicacy of its negotiation alongside meaningful engagement with the subject and its constitutive politics.  

Living in such image-saturated environments as we do, digital literacy across micro-blogging platforms produce new ways of seeing and being seen. A potent example would be TikTok—an extra-institutional platform where an algorithm compressed a highly stratified society, and enabled especially the small-town, rural or vernacular user to explore and visibilise leisure against mainstream narratives of labour. But the application’s generative possibilities were subsumed in narratives of vulgarity in which its subversive potential is registered. In the culturally tutored experience of looking, are such active adoptions and adaptations of image-making cultures ignored? Can the academic gaze move past the rhetoric of “identification” and accommodate narratives from the margin itself?

Addressing the precarity of teaching in the current scenario where in-person classes are made impossible by the necessity of physical distancing, Singhal insists that there should be an important framework beyond strict curricula where works can emerge out of creative collaborations. The lockdown has undeniably resulted in crucial revelations about hierarchies of access to resources among students in addition to anxieties about the future. The National Institute of Design (N.I.D.), where Singhal teaches, has been the locus of critique as an institution that reproduces patterns of elitism and privilege, which has worsened with the current digital divide among students. “Engagement” is discussed not only as distraction and occupation of time, but also as a means to cope in altered conditions. Given the unforeseen adjustments in daily life and forced distance from the institution and peers, students look around themselves for stimuli. It is undeniably a privilege to still continue engaging in critical pedagogy as more vulnerable public institutions have been compelled to suspend their curricula indefinitely. In such a landscape, how does one navigate the very visible practical fissures in academia? How do theory and an urgent political crisis interact with and co-exist in one’s thinking and practice? What function could the institution assume in dismantling the status quo and ensure an equitable environment for its students? And in the light of these intersectional dynamics, how does the autodidact fare as an agent without institutional tutelage?

 

Najrin Islam (NI): How would you describe the role of pedagogy in shaping socially relevant bodies of photographic work? Does the methodology entail processes of unlearning?

Rishi Singhal (RS): Any influence that a person receives and imbibes by virtue of their academic experience can be attributed to the role that pedagogy plays in shaping minds. There can be different kinds and levels of educational training, academies and teachers within an academic field. Furthermore, there need not be a uniform code of curriculum and objectives. Depending on the institution—and especially in cases where the social contexts are privileged—it  becomes important to rely on the knowledge of history, geography, regional politics, social order, mythology, and the like. An emphasis on general awareness, discourse and critique plays an equally important role in this direction.

Unlearning is not an easy process as we happen to be the creatures of conditioning. Even without research or observation, we often believe that we know a certain phenomenon. If we happen to be obtuse to questioning and criticism, we tend to become self-righteous. So, subtracting this baggage helps individuals open up to fresh perspectives and new planes of knowledge. It allows them to evolve within contemporary frameworks and their associated challenges. At N.I.D. Photography Design, such methodologies are carefully integrated within its pedagogical approaches: students progressively engage in workshops and theory-based studies—including the study of social movement—that directly or tangentially challenge perspectives that may have otherwise been casually formed.

NI: With the digital medium increasingly resulting in a culture of dispersed visual information, how do you extend areas of critical inquiry for your students? How is the changing nature of photographic technology accommodated/navigated in the curricula?

RS: The amount of information available to anyone today through a smart device and an internet connection is boundless. Social media traffic and content-sharing platforms are constantly determining and influencing almost everything that we see and hear. This has catapulted people's need to consume visual information. But humans are also engaged in consumption at a pace that does not let their minds actually register this information; in fact, every item of information need not be relevant. Critical inquiry—which plays an important role in this filtering process—is an important aspect of our pedagogical approach. It is consolidated through various theory courses through the semesters as well as a weekly critique of work-in-progress during the practice-based Design Project courses.

We try to stay at par with the new developments in technology, but it is not always possible to be completely abreast with the changes. Out of the two-and-a-half years or five semesters of the M.Des. programme's coursework, the third semester is dedicated to what we call “Introduction to Convergence Media.” This continues into the fourth semester in a more advanced form. With the onslaught of the pandemic last year, we have migrated to various ways of remote facilitation and situational learning. We are now moving towards a better understanding of the “virtual space” not just as a medium, but as its own entity with its challenges and potential.

NI: There was an interesting discussion on the role of documentation and how gaze can travel across generations of photographers. Could you comment on this insidious perpetuation of a photographic gaze (which is also often gendered) and if/how other methodologies that can be explored in institutional settings?

RS: We are conditioned to replicate what we learn. It is worth noting that in the subcontinent, traditional art and craft forms mostly rely on the honing of the respective skill through apprentices and methodologies that are geared towards achieving a predetermined (and dated) form and function. Our colonial past has also influenced generations of masses to uphold the imperial mannerisms of photographic depiction. Even in the last seventy odd years since the country's independence from the British rule, almost all reputed photo agencies, publishing houses and institutions including museums, academies and galleries—that any student or emerging professional aspires to—widely followed the curricula, ideologies and aesthetic sensibilities of the West. This has tended to function as a general benchmark in photography training or education. The continuity of the same syllabi for decades without contextual updates (other than technology) further adds to its perpetuation.

It is only in the last few years that the photography enthusiast has become exposed to references other than the canonical ones, which were mostly authored by individuals with certain geo-cultural identities and perspectives, and that may or may not be as contextually relevant in the subcontinent today. All these factors seldom allow for explorations beyond those accepted and passed down through the generations. Any institution with an agenda to address this gross issue can drive their pedagogical approach by first acknowledging this influence, amplifying voices from marginalised communities, and by cultivating critical thinking, empathy and confidence in students to encourage active deviations from formulaic patterns of thinking.

To read about the previous conversations in this series, please click here, here and here.

All images courtesy of Rishi Singhal.