Photography and Narcissism
May-2007
Sadanand Menon is a cultural commentator; photographer and stage lights designer. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai....Read more
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Burnt To the Grain
Apr-2007
Sadanand Menon is a cultural commentator, photographer and stage lights designer.
He is currently visiting Professor at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai
...Read more
|
The Photogrpher's Block
Mar-2007
Sadanand Menon is a cultural commentator, photographer and stage lights designer. He is currently VisitingProfessor at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai
...Read more
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Photography and Memory
Feb-2007
Sadanand Menon is a cultural commentator, photographer and stage lights designer. He is currently VisitingProfessor at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai....Read more
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Re-photographing the Photograph
Jan-2007
Burnt to the Grain, as a column, completes twelve months with this. An year of monthly reflections on issues about and around photography. I felt I should dedicate this edition to an act in photography that I indulge in regularly ...Read more
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Photo-Static
Dec-2006
Is the photographer a documenter or is s/he a storyteller? Is the photograph a ‘slice of life’ detached from time or is it a moment within a continuum? The question can suck us deep into the vortex of the mystery called visual...Read more
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Nostalgic for a
Nov-2006
I write this column in a strange frame of mind. I have just finished reading Alive and Clicking (Penguin, 2005), the memoirs of octogenarian photographer T S Satyan. The lucid prose of the narrator, with an endearing transparency ...Read more
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Negative Nationalism of the Camera-Eye
Oct-2006
The excessive use of the camera and our increasing familiarity, the last one hundred years, with the arrested image has led to profound changes in our ocular practices, in our modes of 'seeing', in the rampant institutionalizati...Read more
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Photography’s Blind Spot
Sep-2006
Photographers claim to ‘see’ through their camera. And what they see ostensibly represents ‘reality.’ It is necessary, however, to reflect upon what aspects of reality the camera edits out even as it fram...Read more
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Image as Representation of Event
Aug-2006
As photojournalism came into its own in the early decades of the 20th century, it provided verbal stories with much needed evidentiary backup. As the saying goes, ‘one picture speaks more than a thousand words’. In on...Read more
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"I have seized the light"
Jul-2006
That is what Louis Daguerre screamed out, 167 years ago to his disconcerted wife, when he discovered an exquisite picture on the inadquately exposed copper plate he had stored in his cupoard for 24 hours. It was 1839. The era of B...Read more
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Why the Camera Needs to Learn to Dream
Jun-2006
Photography and the human body engage in a special relationship. The body – or its fragment – is the most photographed ‘object’ of our times. Yet, there is a natural tension between the body’s imp...Read more
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Photography in Electoral Democracy
May-2006
It was fifty years ago, in his 1956 essay ‘Photography and Electoral Appeal’, that the master analyst of the photograph as a semiotic ‘sign’, Roland Barthes, made a pithy connection between the ubiquitous...Read more
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Photographers who clicked together
Apr-2006
It is entirely rare to find photographer couples. There is something in the nature of the medium, something that turns people into aggressively competitive loners I presume, which discourages marital compatibility between high-pro...Read more
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Photography and the Provocative Portrait
Mar-2006
Marlene Dietrich has mesmerised me all over again. The venue for 'Berlinale', the Berlin Film Festival, is at the Marlene Dietrich Platz (Square). The ten days I spent there in February, it was impossible not to be seduced by thos...Read more
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