Privacy is a book I have inhabited, even though its pages bear no portrait of mine. Between its “Tiffany blue covers”, as Dayanita calls them, are people in their homes with whom I have had imaginary conversations. I sit with them on ornate floral sofas, lie on four-poster beds and lean against heavy teak banisters. Tinkering on an aunt’s piano, wearing my mother’s silk sari or petting my grandfather’s dog, I envision myself embedded within these families. Together, we pose for Dayanita’s camera to build the archetypal family album that becomes Privacy.
This slender, nearly square-shaped book lies wedged between other volumes of photography on my mother’s bookshelf at her home in New Delhi. It came to her in 2003, when I was 20 years old, about the same age as several young women in the book’s photographs. Privacy was often brought out when my mother and I discussed and studied photographic practices, but it was also a subject for personal contemplation. On the many occasions that I have found it lying on the sofa in the drawing room or on my sister’s bed-side table, its inhabitants beckoned to me to engage with them.
Privacy bore secrets about a world that wished to remain aloof, defined by its eliteness. In the portraits, artefacts in grandiose homes have a museum-like quality, not inviting one to touch but to desire from a distance. Privacy does not make voyeurs of us, even as it peels back the walls of invisibility that surround India’s well-to-do families. It comes to us as a limited invitation into their homes, where they pose prepared to receive us. Some empty chairs, beds and tables reconstruct their users’ spirits, eerie and engaging at the same time. The strikingly beautiful women who populate the pages look out to engage with the viewer’s gaze, the latter’s socio-historical or sexual locus may go on to eroticize or exoticize the feminine. The sitters’ gazes have met with the photographer’s own in moments of conversation, confession and stillness that the beholders of the book want to be privy to.
Entering the frame seems like the only way to really know what transpires at the photographic moment. It seems carefully constructed, yet there are occasional elements of disquiet: an elegant son steals a look at his wife who gazes deferentially at her mother-in-law, a child comically slithers off her father’s lap just as the shutter releases, a maid hurriedly enters the frame behind a seated matriarch, and a dog stretches languidly on the sofa while the master stands in his colonial drawing room. ‘Privacy’ hangs in the air, at the precise moment of its release from the subject, and its arrest on Dayanita’s lens. It consists of reasons and stories known only to the family and the photographer as confidante, stories which have beginnings and ends in the photograph, but not the intervening narrative. Hence, one wonders at the depths of privacy that this book has tapped. The tone and texture of the book’s portraits reveal the photographer’s identity, as friend or acquaintance, familiar and trusted by her sitters. The book allows a private moment to somehow remain private even as the world looks on. It is as if at once, all the families in Privacy know of each other’s conversations with Dayanita, but they do not spill out of the book. To be in Privacy is a privilege of friendship.
I have written elsewhere about the long-awaited moment for our family, when Dayanita came home to photograph us in 2018 [1]. We instinctively envisioned our portrait in continuity with Privacy, a definitive book album depicting the performance of ‘familyness’[2]. A copy of it belonged to us, but in some way, we also belonged to it. We constructed ourselves to be part of its ongoing narrative.
For the portrait, we wore silks and jewellery, clustering our bodies around a winged armchair in the drawing room of my parents’ home. Privacy had lent its tenor to our family portrait, enclosing us within its pages, giving us a glimpse of how we would look, even before the photograph was taken. We knew, for instance, that objects would have as much presence as people in the frame, that a deep velvety blackness would permeate the folds of our clothes and the crevices of our furniture, that the floral chandelier on the ceiling would light up the frame but also enter it as an aesthetic element, and that the fidgety child in the portrait would skew its balance.
There is another realm of privacy that remains entirely unseen and unknown, and that is within Dayanita’s own home/archive, where the negatives, contact sheets and first prints of these photographs reside. Having had access to this space, I realize that her dialogues and interventions with the photographs span months and years, part of a complex editing process that few are privy to. Dayanita immerses herself in experiencing the visual, sonorous and sensual charge of her photographs as she chooses and arranges them for her books, book-objects and museums. Her exchange with the images produces an array of works, some of which have found space in my own home. The Pothi Box (2018) lies with my saris in the cupboard, while File Room (2013) is placed between two important files in the study. Sent a Letter (2008) lives next to stationery while a poster of Go Away Closer (2007) hangs at the entrance to my office. What we do with these works within our private domains remains up to us. We may wish to keep or share, hide or show, but they will always throb with a life of their own within our worlds. As Dayanita says, they are a part of her own home within ours, in a shared privacy of sorts.
1. Suryanandini Narain, ‘The Family Intact: the experience of posing for a portrait’ in Trans Asia Photography Review ed. Deepali Dewan, Family Photographs, Hampshire College. Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
2. Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen, “The Family Gaze,” Tourist Studies. London: Sage Publications, 2003: 25-26