Conceptualised and facilitated by Madhuban Mitra & Manas Bhattacharya
30 July–4 August
As the quintessential 21st century medium, photography is everywhere, everything is photography (from photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to an MRI scan of the human brain) and everyone is a photographer. One of the enduring myths about photography is that it is always “about” something. In our own context, photography is almost never allowed to be itself without being yoked to some kind of function or message. Though artists have, more often than not, used photography in ways other than the functional and the informational, the dominant perception remains largely unshaken. Such a deeply conservative, one-sided view of an eclectic and generous medium comes primarily from the throttlehold of news media, photo agencies, and more generally the information empire to which photography was hitched early on, as well as its extensive use value. Why is it that photographs have to describe or illustrate something or ought to, like the climate crisis or identity politics? Ironically, photography is neither an efficient nor a reliable medium of description or illustration, yet it has been consistently pressed into serving such agendas.
What if we shift the vantage, eschew verisimilitude, indexicality, evidentiality, topicality, didacticism and dozens of other burdens photography has borne, and look at its other histories, rather at ideas, attitudes and practices that tap the unique properties of a medium that is expansive, nimble and resilient if freed from all prescriptions and projections? What if we allowed photographs to lie rather than show and tell the truth? Regarded as such, photography approaches its sister medium cinema and builds bridges with the other arts like painting, sculpture or literature.
The workshop will consider the different ways in which photography, often conventionally understood as embodying single, more or less autonomous images, can approach narrative. The term narrative is often misunderstood, and or used interchangeably with story. Studies of narrative and narrativity, primarily within literary studies, make for a nuanced understanding of why story and narrative, though enmeshed, are different: the “what” of the story as distinct from the “how” of narrative. Narrative is not to be confused with ‘photo story’ as defined by magazine reportage or editorial photography. We will explore the history of photography as narrative in its fiction, hybrid, semi-fiction and non-fiction variations. This entails a deep dive into a range of pivotal narrative photographic projects made in the last sixty years in different parts of the world, for instance the Photo-roman/Photo-Novel form or photo-fictions that use the photographic sequence as opposed to the single staged photograph. There is a loose, somewhat arbitrary conglomeration of single images posing as “poetic” narrative quite rampant in the photography world, especially in the form of photo books, which is not under consideration here. Rather, the workshop will place particular emphasis on ideas of sequentiality, montage, cinematicity, narrative structure and various modes of staging. The discussion will also focus on how the notion of the cinematic in photo narratives, a kind of “paper cinema”, functions in ways different from cinema, with which it obviously has the closest kinship. Image-text narrative works, combining photography with writing/literature would be another focal point. When there is a text/literary component, how does it shape and interact with the visual component, as opposed to fully visual photo narratives?
Instead of lectures recycling theory in the abstract, the workshop envisages a deep, participatory engagement with practices and works through which different modes and strategies of working with photography and narrative can be illuminated. For example, we will look closely at how ideas of self-portraiture, performativity and cinematicity intersect with gender politics and the city-as-stage in the narrative work of artists as different as David Wojnarowicz and Pushpamala N. We will examine how the categories like personal and political, subject and object, observer and observed, or documentary and fiction dissolve in the photo-narrative works of Allan Sekula, Sophie Calle, Duane Michals or Lynn Hershman-Leeson, or how fictional archives are set in motion to interrogate the document, history and notions of truth in the work of Joan Fontcuberta or Zoe Leonard.
Facilitators
Manas Bhattacharya and Madhuban Mitra have been working together as an artist duo for the last decade and half, primarily with photography, film and video and more recently, Artificial Intelligence. Madhuban studied English Literature and holds a Ph.D in Cultural Studies. Manas studied Cinematography after completing a Masters in Comparative Literature. Their practice probes the nature of images and their relationship to society, politics and technology, with a particular interest in how history and memory both shape, and in turn are shaped by images. Often driven by extensive research, their work oscillates between and often combines documentary and fiction, analogue and digital, images made and found, still and moving, abstraction and figuration. Their work resides in the permanent collections of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) Chicago, Fondazione MAST, Bologna, and private collections around the world. They conceived and developed the curriculum for courses they taught as visiting faculty in the Masters programme in Photography at the National Institute of Design (NID), Gandhinagar, between 2017-2022.
Essential information
Important Dates
- Deadline for submitting applications: 30 June 2025
- Selected participants will be informed by 10 July 2025
- Workshop dates: 30 July–4 August 2025
- Participants will arrive in Kasauli on 29 July and leave on 5 August 2025.
Costs
- There are no participation fees.
- Accommodation (shared basis) and food for the duration of the workshop in Kasauli will be covered by SSAF.
- Participants will pay for the travel to and from Chandigarh/Kalka. In case you are unable to do so, please write to us at: ssaf.kasauliartproject@gmail.com
SSAF will arrange transport from Chandigarh/Kalka to SKAP.
The closest train stations are in Chandigarh (1.5 hours by road from Kasauli) and Kalka (45 minutes by road from Kasauli). There are several trains daily to Chandigarh and Kalka from Delhi. The closest airports are in Delhi and Chandigarh.
Application
Please submit your application via the form here. The SKAP Summer School is open only to Indian nationals residing in India. For this particular workshop, the participants are only expected to have a history of engagement with or an interest in working with images and narrative. Applications may be sent in any Indian language. However the discussions will primarily be conducted in basic English.
The application requires the following material:
1. A resume detailing your educational and professional background/experiences, and the history of your work/practice. Upload as a PDF document.
2. A portfolio of your selected work/projects, that provides an overview of your current practice, and helps us understand the core interests, concerns, processes that inform it and/or the locus of inquiries, experiments, explorations or research undergirding it. Upload as a PDF document.
The portfolio does not need to follow any particular format. You may structure it in the way you think it best provides a window to your work. The portfolio need not necessarily be restricted to or include only photographic /photo-based work. For example, if you are a writer/critic, it could include a selection or excerpts from texts you have written. If you are a filmmaker or performance/theatre artist, it could include links to your work in those media.
Please include short contextual notes or synopses where appropriate. You may include open links to your artworks in any medium and/or writing (in case they are password-protected, please mention the passwords alongside) or any other material you think is pertinent. Upload as a PDF document.
3. A short response to the concept of the SKAP Summer School (read here)
How do you relate to the proposition of the SKAP Summer School in terms of what you are thinking, imagining, working on and/or struggling with at the moment? Upload as a PDF document. [maximum 500 words]
4. A statement of interest about the topic of this workshop: Photography and/as Narrative.
What specifically motivates you to participate in this particular workshop? How does the trajectory of your work or thinking intersect, align, overlap or connect with the workshop’s area of focus? What do you expect or hope to discover or explore in this workshop? Upload as a PDF document. [maximum 500 words]
5. A note about your relationship with literature. What kinds of literature do you gravitate towards, and what are some of the books that you have read recently? Mention some of your favourite authors, and tell us about some books that have affected you deeply or shaped your thinking? What made them significant for you? Upload as a PDF document. [maximum 500 words]