Visions Less Visionary

Five decades of observation, camera in hand, would expectedly yield a fascinating body of work. Today, anyone would be "naturally excited" in anticipation of viewing such a reflection of the photographer’s times, a chronicle of the past, some historical moments, his insights through privileged access to the lives of eminent contemporaries, perhaps a document of the changing human condition over half a century. Friends of Satyan, those who have known him and his work, recall having seen such images taken by him. Satyan himself has chosen to deny us such a viewing in his book.

Instead, the photographer, perhaps conscious of his years, has chosen to impose a definite theme—"the cycle of life"—on the selection of the pictures that comprise the volume. In Love With Life allows us poignant glimpses of the Shri Saamaanya, or common man, making his seamless "journey through life", writes his publisher. "Call it intimate intrusions," writes Satyan, "but it is these simple, ordinary people who dominate my oeuvre. Through a tiny aperture they allowed me to freeze-frame the cycle of life: birth, growth and death."

This comes as a disappointment for the realist viewer, for we are denied his "best work" at the very outset. The limiting metaphysical theme and its subject-images cannot (and should not) be observed as the life’s work of the photographer but more as the photographer’s idea of life. Shedding his working identity, he emerges a concerted pictorialist; loyal to his sentiment, he discards curiosity in favour of sympathy.

The 150-odd black-and-white images on display are a literal exposition of an ageing theme. Babies are born, babies are suckled, babies grow up, children learn, children play, young adults work, they marry, have more babies, get older, they worship, they ponder, they die. Satyan, personally, finds "beauty and truth" in this cycle. He quotes Tagore in the caption to his first photograph: "Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man." His last image sources the Old Testament: "One generation passes away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever." Within these frames lies the "journey". The viewer walks the course, looking for some detail to inform, searching for context and clues, for life’s clutter, for its emptiness, for circumstance, for coincidence, for change, for the constant, for conflict, for calm, only to realise that Satyan’s gaze is focused not on the human condition but on humanity itself. His lens looks directly at the eyes of his subjects. They look back. In the shining eyes, in the glowing skin lies hope and sparkle; in dulled eyes, in lined skin lies inevitability and calm. Satyan’s vision is altogether subjective: one can empathise if one adopts his stance, if one can accept the acknowledgement to the photographer in the eyes of the subject (even those mourning the dead look back); there is absolutely no room for the sceptic.

An abdication to Satyan’s vision may be satisfying for the believer, but is not quite so rewarding for the curious. Oddly, his indifference to the times of the lives of his subjects results in a kind of timelessness across the pages. One could easily shuffle the pictures about and end up with the same gaze; one might exchange a photograph taken in 1960 for one taken in 1999 and not feel the incongruity, or rather, feel more of the sameness. For a documentary photographer this would be disastrous; for a pictorialist it is blissful. Such sameness across lives observed, over a life lived, provokes a thought, stated with respect: while the subjects have passed through the ‘cycle of life’ to mark the ageing of the artist, one wonders who has grown?

Today, Satyan is accorded fond recognition by his subjects. Occasionally, he receives invitations to the weddings of those whom he had photographed at birth. He is sometimes given news of a death.