Exploring Optical Appearances
Sharmistha Saha
INDIA AND ITS VISUAL CULTURES: COMMUNITY, CLASS AND GENDER IN A SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPE by Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann SAGE Publications, 2018, 379 pp., 1100
April 2019, volume 43, No 4

This volume edited by Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann is a significant contribution to understanding the visual media.  It moves away from the approach taken by Gayatri Sinha in a previous book published in 2009 called Art and Visual Culture in India, 1857-2007 which primarily located visual culture within art and art history. Skoda and Lettmann’s edited volume ‘… aims to contribute to a more comprehensive anthropological, rather than art-historical mapping of contemporary empirical visual cultures in India…’.

Given the broad scope of the work, Skoda and Lettmann identify the basis of their work in the ‘pictorial turn’ in the humanities and the social sciences as proposed by the American scholar WJT Mitchell in his seminal work Picture Theory first published in 1992. Borrowing from Mitchell they focus on the picture as an object of study rather than an object located within the disciplinary boundary of art history. The work does not remain limited within the object of the picture/image but rather looks at different kinds of optical appearances. In fact the book is divided into various sections according to the optical appearance that each of the contributed essays explore. Primarily in this case five parts have been looked at. They are camera works, folk/artistry, market signs, pictorial politics and monumental landscapes. However, these subdivisions within this book are not cursory, rather Skoda and Lettmann try to explore them conceptually within the interdisciplinary area of visual culture.

Locating the use of photography in research in the nineteenth century, followed by ethnographic filmmaking, the book tries to understand concepts such as darshan as explored by Diana L Eck. Darshan as ritualistic visuality placed within everyday life becomes a methodological trope in understanding social processes. While talking about everyday visuality, Skoda and Lettmann explore concepts such as popular and the public borrowing from different theoretical pools. However, the book does not limit the usage of either of the concepts in the individual essays. Popular culture and/or public culture is then explored through the concept of memory and its manifestations or its triggers. Embodied memory and mediated memory, narrativization associated to such memory whether short lived or continuing to survive through generations is conceptually understood within the context of the image as also the statue.

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