Movies and photography came to India as soon as the technology developed in the West. In fact Indians were avid fans of daguerreotypes and early cinematic forms of expression from the late 19th Century, especially in the two colonial cities of Bombay and Calcutta. The conceit of both media i.e. the moving and the still, has been its power of illusion. It brought depictions of the West to India and vice versa of India to the British and Europeans. No matter which way photographs were traveling they were portraying a fantasy world far removed from the reality that they had come from.

Nishtha Jain, in her movie The City of Photos erases all doubts about the manipulation of the photographic image. Ripped photos are carefully reassembled to portray a different relationship from the originals. People are placed together in ways that are meaningful to the patron. Painted backdrops are used to summon up associations of places visited, places dreamed of, and also of extraordinary events and catastrophes, such as planes flying into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a train wreck, a hurricane, etc. These are backdrops that have little if anything to do with the sitters. Instead they are the projection of the photographic studio. A world event has occurred, therefore, the businessman/photographer they will capitalize on it. For viewers looking at these photos years later, and if the events can be recognized, then at least a time frame has been provided. Such timeliness is also evident from the clothes worn, the colors, the styles of hair, etc.

PhotoShop today provides most of us with basic computer skills, the tools with which to alter, rearrange, create and “improve” photographic images. Professional photographers have always used the darkroom to produce special effects, our own home-grown Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham come immediately to mind. Nishtha Jain in her film reveals the constructions of photography, leaving no doubt that the final image is enhanced by mechanical and technical interventions.

Despite the arbitrariness of the elaborate and artificial settings, the photographs summon up nostalgic references. Were previous times better than today? Were the high-collared and tied and suited men, carefully sariied women, with their immaculately-dressed children any better off or happier under the British in colonial Calcutta than their grandchildren are today?

When looking at old photos nostalgia inevitably is aroused. But, nostalgia for what? And, for whom? We look at old photos, whether of our own families or from some thrift shop, and wonder, who these people really were. Jain states in the film, “If you look at a photograph long enough it begins to disturb you.” Eyes stare out at you and beyond you. Who was this person? What were they thinking at the time the photograph was taken? Did they know they would be immortalized through chemical transformation? The barely-living victims of the 1877 Madras famine, were dragged together and placed before a white sheet, photographed and then left. But, their images have been etched on the minds of all of us who have seen them. Also––the young woman bathed in sepia tones who engages us with her soulful eyes––we wonder if this was a marriage photo. Children in various stages of attention disarmingly attract us. The anonymity of these photos reduces the human condition to a common denominator.

On the other hand, Jain prompts us to ask why people choose to be photographed. In the studios we see the primping and powdering, the dressing and the undressing, that people off the street engage in, in order to present their idealized selves. Their egos, our egos, wrapped in fantasy, to be immortalized, to be remembered, perhaps, to be saved and seen generations from now, when they and us have long been forgotten.

Whether photos are of the people of Calcutta, Peking, San Francisco or London is immaterial, Jain provides insights into the human psyche and the yearning for immortality through the captured moment.