The photograph is quite an ordinary one, two fisherwomen in low light with baskets on their heads, the woman in front looking unhappy. What gets me about this picture, published in a recent issue of an Indian photo magazine, is the photographer’s comment underneath: “I shot this from a distance of less than a metre away from the lady carrying fishes in her basket. Her obvious irritation at being shot adds an edge to the photograph.”

For a moment I try to see if the photographer is being ironic but clearly she’s being no such thing. She’s completely unselfconscious about what she’s saying and that stretches to the jarring, patronizing use of the word “lady” for a person for whom she clearly has scant respect. It’s one of those small things that send me into a fury. “Go try that with some rich nasties,” I feel like snapping, “and then see what kind of ‘edge’ that lends to your image and your life!”

Thinking about it, though, unhappy-making signs emerge about photography, image-making in general, and more specifically about what we’ve learned to call ‘street photography’.

The act of spontaneously ‘capturing’ random human subjects is almost as old as the photograph itself, coming into its proper genre as the equipment progressively becomes lighter and more portable. By the mid-Thirties, Brassaï, Henri-Cartier Bresson and Walker Evans, to name just three great exponents, are already established with their distinctive styles. The years of World War II see a further advance of this ‘shot from the hip’ photography, where the spontaneity is lent a very real edge by the fact that the streets and fields are filled with flying bullets and shrapnel, with fast-dropping bombs, none of which makes any distinction between photographer and subject — the man with the camera is soldered by mortal danger to the man with the rifle or the fleeing woman with the baby.

The Fifties and Sixties see an even more rapid development: the film emulsions become more sensitive, the lenses become ‘faster’, that is, able to capture more information in ever lower light, and, most importantly, photographers divest themselves of the last notions of the classic painterly compositions that have ruled European visual art since the Renaissance. The ‘composition’, the excitement, the aesthetic payload all now lie completely in the blur, in the implied movement of the still frame, in the immediacy of the action or the meditation on the absence of such action.

By the Sixties and Seventies, just as we had our own rockets and our own athletic stadiums, we now had our own formidable street photographers in people such as Raghubir Singh and Raghu Rai. Also, by then, Calcutta was one of the largest godowns of human misery in the world and one of the major spin-off products this warehouse offered, along with massive ‘feel-good’ opportunities for all kinds of fraternities of Mercy and Pity and Aid, were the varying images of this misery.

By the mid-Seventies, people thinking about such things in Calcutta became aware that the city was on the front-line of the battle of the eyelines: put very simply, there were a hell of a lot of people in the world whose condition of existence was appalling; the people of the privileged world needed — from time to time and for varying, conflicting, reasons — to see images of this less fortunate majority; there was, therefore, money (and power) to be accrued from the act of making images of the poor, the disaster-struck, the vulnerable; the people making these images had taken the artistry of the street-photo geniuses of the Fifties and Sixties, the Robert Franks, the William Kleins and Lee Friedlanders and turned their styles into an industry; they had developed certain tendencies in the way they took/made those pictures and these tendencies tended to further disempower the people being photographed — not only were they deprived economically and politically, they were now deprived of dignity and humanity in the arena of the image-world as well. Stemming from this, centres such as Gaston Roberge’s Chitrabani began to develop a different way of looking at and photographing people in the bastis and roadsides of this city.

In those days at Chitrabani there were quite sharp debates about the hows and whys of taking a ‘street’ photograph. For example, what did it mean when the camera was pointed down at a person as opposed to being at the same eye-level? What did it mean when you photographed people with a long telephoto lens, as you did wildlife, as opposed to shooting with a normal or wide-angle lens which obliged the photographer to have a human exchange with his subject? What did you choose to include or exclude while framing and why? Did the person being photographed have any say at all in the image being constructed about and around her? Could the photographer dream of having any control on how his or her image was finally used?

The debate (always linked to practical work in the area), threw up some fantastic work by photographers Brian Balen and Salim Paul; it also influenced people like Sheba Chhachhi, whose work with the women’s movement in Delhi became the basis for her ground-breaking art installations and later, more constructed photography works; it also fundamentally influenced documentary film-makers in the late Eighties and early Nineties as they sought to engage with the political movements burgeoning in rural eastern India and other parts of the country.

This discussion did make its way to Bombay and Delhi and, I’m guessing, down to the south, but at the moment it seems to have been elbowed aside, one of the babies chucked out with the bathwater of licence raj and the old-style mixed economy. It seems it is once again okay for photographers to be like fighter-pilots. As in the bad old days, it’s once again about ‘me and my camera’ about ‘me and my complicated toy’, and not about anyone else. It’s okay, great, even, as Natasha Hemrajani tells us in Better Photography magazine, to poke some working-class lady with our lens and ‘irritate’ her into giving us an ‘edge’ for our all precious, free-standing, photograph, this image which has nothing at all to do with the hard graft of the subject’s life and solely to do with the photographer’s greater glory as an ‘artist’.

At a time when there is a massive proliferation of image-making equipment, when cameras are more widely accessible than ever before, it may be quixotic to the extreme to try and lay down rules and moral modalities about the taking of still and moving images. At a time when the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not have completely dissolved, when the pornographic of all definitions has infiltrated the bloodstream of general imagery like asbestos dust, it may be impossible or even inadvisable to imagine a societal consensus about how we manufacture and deploy images in our lives. While remembering older ways of thinking about photo-making and documenting, it would probably also be wise to understand that the role a camera plays in an Indian street is undergoing a fundamental shift.

The other day, filming for a documentary during the bandh, my cameraman and I noticed a strange phenomenon: no one approached us, either with curiosity or with officiousness so beloved of the Calcutta lumpen to ask what or why we were shooting. On the other hand, a bunch of kids splashing about in a hydrant-jacuzzi demanded that we film them. Laughing in the water they shouted at us, not using the old phrase “Chhabi tolo!” — “Take a picture/ make an image” but “Aamader camera koro!”— “Camera us!” We immediately connected this to an old baul guru we were filming 20 years ago, who laughed at our crew: “I’m going to get a camera and come into the houses of all you city people. We’ll see how you like it then!” The old guru may no longer be capable of entering our citificated lives as a voyeur but these young kids from the hydrant, with their fascination clearly shifting from the product — the image — to the equipment, now they may soon be in a mood to shoot at the shootists from a distance of far less than three metres. And our helpless anger at being thus photographed may add a very pleasurable edge to the images they capture and display.