THE ASIAN AGE: Calcutta, Mumbai, Delhi, London
08/03/1997 , By PRADYOT LAL
PRADYOT LAL meets photographer Diwan Manna, whose camera captures slow, inevitable dehumanization with an understanding eye
Let us face it: the camera is an intruder. It can capture on film a thought, an expression, which in fact could well be a momentary response or digression on part of the one it “captures.” And after capturing that moment, the picture could often end up conveying more than it intends to, but that’s a photographer’s occupational hazard, or maybe privilege, if one is inclined to think that way. In that sense, the total picture is a convenient myth as convenient as absolute truth. But what the viewer sees transforms him; from the subject to the object, from the viewer to the view. In the bargain, you either connect with the captured image or don’t.
That is what makes photography such an instant art. The camera is there, and all that you have to do is to click, but if it had been that simple Diwan Manna would not be what he is – a young man who refuses to conform in line with popular notions of acceptability. He sure has an eye that looks beyond the obvious. What he captures on film has a language, an idiom of its own, but the meaning behind the image is what you and I make of it. Manna is sick of making fashionable, politically correct statements; although that by no stretch means that he does not have a definite perspective of his own.
Growing up in the shadow of rival guns and their contrasting polemic, and in an atmosphere where one gun has always sought to proclaim itself as the better or the more legitimate one of the two, means you, the observer, have to take sides. But in the end, all that the gun does is to kill, maim and brutalise. The photographer, whether he likes it or not, has to own up the end result even where photography is a highly subjective view of objective reality. Manna, at first sight, does not lend himself to the comfort of one view vis-à-vis the other. But then, he is too conscious actually to proclaim himself as someone above the regular din. The turbulence in Punjab can be, as it has been, reduced to set of convenient interpretations – gun vs. gun, pro-national vs. anti-national, terror vs. terror and so on. Manna’s work, let the viewer be forewarned, has been widely celebrated in terms of awards and accolades, but it seems that all such recognition has left him deeply untouched somewhere.
For, as he explains in that charmingly direct style of his, he knows what he wants to say, and therefore, tries to avoid the hazards of being indiscriminately trigger happy as many of his breed end up becoming. He has seen violence and hypocrisy; blood and sweat; alienation and dehumanization. He has let his camera wander into stranger climes as well and that suggests that he is not yet ready to be categorized. His is certainly the language of understatement. “I try to come to terms with the insidious and unrecognized forms of our brutalization, the degradation of the sense of life and honour within ourselves as well as in others," says Diwan Manna.
Manna is deeply disturbed by the collapse of human sensitivities in such theatres of violence as Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and of course, in his own Punjab. But, as he says, “I am not merely interested in presenting images of the destruction of human goodness, courage and beauty, but I try to tap the unsuspected and as yet unrealized sources of tenderness, fortitude and humanity.”
Beyond what he says, Manna’s pictures speak a language of their own.
This may sound more clichéd than it is in actual fact, because ultimately, it is our way of seeing a picture that matters to us and more often than not, to the photographer too. When the symbiosis clicks, the picture does. At times when what he wants others to appreciate does not evoke a corresponding reaction makes Manna naturally sad, but he is hardly the one who will take such inevitable heartbreaks of his trade to heart. He is not arrogant about his craft; only, he knows that he is good, and that makes the task of knowing and talking to him easier. Next time when you happen to come across a notice regarding his photo-exhibition, group or solo – make it a point to visit it, chat him up, and you will feel rewarded. The Art Gallery at Dewsbury Museum, West Yorkshire, has already been drawn to Manna’s rare sensitivity, and if our photographer friend decides to become market-friendly, he will soon become hotter property still. Some of us may not be too comfortable with the prospect; maybe, even Manna is not, but it seems highly unlikely that his essential empathy will be corrupted.
