Man Ray, Tears (1932)

The extent to which the battle to get photography admitted into the Palace of Art, at least of Western Art, has been quite gloriously won was driven home to me by an exhibition that I found myself visiting thrice when I was in Madrid recently . It was called Lágrimas de Eros (Tears of Eros), and was installed in two venues in the city, the ThyssenBornemisza Museum and the Caja Madrid Foundation, and was curated by Guillermo Solana, artistic director of the former. It was an exquisite show about the pain of love and the love of pain. In its effortless sweep from Bernini to Bill Viola, it dissolved the boundaries between periods, nations and media in Western art to bring together a history of what Solana, invoking Freud and Bataille, calls the perverso polimorfo -the phrase taking on a sort of baroque magnificence in Spanish that its English version, with its note of intellectualized hanky-panky , sadly lacks.

What struck me particularly about Solana’s learned, eccentric yet unfussy curating was the way he used photography with a kind of unabashed, operatic abandon. The signature image was Man Ray’s 1932 photograph, Tears, of five evidently fake celluloid pearls stuck around a woman’s upturned and mascara’d eyes in brutal close-up. The image was blown up to cover the entire façade of one of the venues, opposite which was a Counter-Reformation convent still inhabited by nuns — a very Hispanic coincidence straight out of Almodóvar’s Dark Habits. Inside, next to the Man Ray photograph and on a pedestal, were Kiki Smith’s five glass tears. As you peered into each giant droplet, you saw yourself bizarrely disfigured in its clear, but claustrophobic, world of glass. Then, as you lost and found yourself in the show’s visual and thematic labyrinths, you would have run into a bikini-clad teenager on the beach shot by Rineke Dijkstra hung close to a Rodin Birth of Venus, Richard Avedon’s Nastassja Kinski cuddling up with a cobra next to a Toulouse-Lautrec lithograph of a snake-woman, Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s upside-down pole-dancer rubbing shoulders with a Surrealist nude, a Nan Goldin kiss against an Edvard Munch kiss, Sam Taylor-Wood’s Beckham (the footballer) sleeping alongside Canova’s Endymion (the moon-struck shepherd), or posed cibachrome Pietás and Ophelias by four different contemporary photographers covering dramatic stretches of museum wall.

Yet, as I got used to the jolts and thrills of these juxtapositions of painting and sculpture with photography, and started reflecting on what they made me see in conjunction or proximity, a peculiar sense of disorientation began to well up somewhere between my eyes and my mind. I still find this difficult to pin down or explain clearly; it keeps eluding precise formulation, although, as a feeling in the viewer, it was strangely sharp. This richly disconcerting sense of something not quite fitting together has to do, I feel, with the fundamentally different relationships with the Real that paintings and photographs come to embody when they are installed for viewing in the same space, and on the same interpretative and cognitive plane — that is, when we are made to read them together. Paintings then seem to afford a purer fiction, for they make something out of nothing (as music makes nothing out of nothing, turning air into air), whereas photographs are doomed always to make something out of something. So, the fictions that photographs create seem corruptions of the Real — brilliant deceptions pulled off with varying degrees of ironic awareness — of the sort that would have made Plato angry. Viewed side by side, paintings appear to be curiously more innocent or naïve as liars than do photographs, which, at their best, prey as much on art as on life, and with a new-found sense of entitlement that is at once exhilarating and vaguely disturbing.

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I was startled by a PTI photograph on the front page of this paper last year. A woman in a lush sari was standing in front of a distinguished-looking audience seated in a hall, recognizably in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. (I could make out the prime minister and his wife in the front row.) The woman stood there holding her face with both hands. Her face was tilted upwards with the eyes closed. I thought she was singing a song. It could have been one of those soirées that take place from time to time in the residences of heads of state all over the civilized world. There was something operatic about the woman. If the setting were not so evidently Indian, she could have been singing an aria to a select gathering, which looked rapt, but poised, as it listened to her outpouring of song.

Then I read the caption, “Teardrops on a medal”. The woman in the picture was an army widow who had come to receive her dead husband’s gallantry award from the president. The report began, “A wail breaks out inside Rashtrapati Bhavan’s Ashoka Hall…” She was not singing an aria. She had lost her composure in public and was howling with grief. The photographer had clicked immediately after her wail broke out, but before the audience had time to react. So their faces still had that stonily cultured look, which contrasted chillingly with the woman’s posture and expression. This made the photograph shockingly, perversely beautiful.

One of the functions of art is to transform suffering and grief into something that we call Beauty for want of a better word. In the process, pain turns into performance, and photography, even when it does not intend to produce art, colludes with this process through its ability to arrest the motion of life at an arbitrary moment. Photojournalism, especially, creates drama out of disaster, sometimes leaving us in a moral quandary. I am often discomfited, for instance, by some of the images that win the World Press Photo awards. They provoke a confusion of response, leaving the viewer unpleasantly suspended between the ethical and the aesthetic. The reverse seems to happen in sports photography and in pictures of performing musicians or dancers: play looks like pain. Straining footballers look like characters in a Passion play, like Christ and his torturers, caught up in a Gothic drama of grimaces and contortions that could be amusing, rather than discomfiting, if viewed out of context. Or think of Annie Leibovitz’s famous portrait of Jessye Norman singing: if you do not know what is happening in the picture, you would take her for a woman caught in the process of being destroyed by some terrible personal tragedy.

When we take unthinking comfort in photography’s documentation of the Real, we tend to forget its more sinister relationship with the Unreal, for the archives of photography could be as full of fiction as of truth. The reassuringly objective could become the treacherously subjective in photographs, and this is the pleasure as well as the menace of photography. My favourite portrait of myself is a photograph that makes me look inscrutable and profound, as if taken exactly when I was seeing into the life of things. But all that I was doing then was trying to hold myself still at the tilt in which the photographer wanted my head in relation to the rest of my body. I remember my mind being quite blank during those precarious and uncomfortable moments. So, that portrait is at once perfectly fake and perfectly true, making a face that was never there, but a face that is now part of the person I have become.