This afternoon, I joined Dev Benegal, Ram Rahman, Marina Budhos, and Aseem Chhabra in a discussion about Indian photography at the Newark Museum. “India: Public Places/Private Spaces” is the name of the splendid exhibition on display there. I read out brief pieces I had written about the work of Raghubir Singh, Pablo Bartholomew, Subodh Gupta, Shantanu Lodh, and Sunil Gupta. My dear friends Sangeeta Rao, Satish Kolluri, and Ali Mir were in the audience. The above image is from Sunil Gupta’s hugely impressive and diverse body of work; the piece I spoke about at the forum today is a different one, “Washing/Disabled,” and can be seen at the Newark exhibit. Here’s what I had to say about it:

“Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places”—Auden wrote that in a poem in 1931. The private-public divide is a Berlin Wall that we as artists love to tear down. We take pictures of the wily politician who, faced with the death of her young son, wears dark glasses that can’t quite hide the tear rolling down her cheek. Or the sunny picture of an ordinary woman tying a pink ribbon in her young daughter’s hair while the Republic Day parade passes in its full military glory behind her. But these are clichés. The real tension in my opinion is between the private vision of the artist and the public image in front of the viewer.

This remarkable composition by Sunil Gupta imposes a unique and vivid reading on a condition that we can only call “Washing/Disabled” because there is no existing name already in place in our language for what we are witnessing. We see clothes, women’s clothes and a girl’s clothes, hung out to dry. The colors are bright against the mud wall and the thatched roof of the hut. Alongside is the picture of a disabled man, he is armless, perhaps an amputee. He is also in a rural setting, although the house is of brick, and there is an alley behind him. The picture of the male is divided from the picture of the absent females. The drama comes from the questions that the pictures raise about participation in life despite disability. Is the disabled man removed from the sphere of the family? Or is the family there despite his disability? The images are from a series called “Country—Portrait of an Indian Family.” Are the pictures even related, except in the artist’s imagination? Or in my imagination as I play with the fear of impotence? The ambiguity here should not be reduced to a sentiment. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that if a gentle breeze were blowing, his empty sleeves would fill up with air and wave like limbs—across the picture’s divide, at the colorful bits of clothing that would no doubt suffer the same agitation or yearning.

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