There was a time, not so long ago, when people of even modest means would decorate their walls with “scenery”. This usually meant pictures cut out of some glossy calendars and framed at the friendly neighbourhood framer or paintings of either mountains/sunrise/waterfalls or all of them in the same painting or boats in very blue waters by the daughter/daughter-in-law of the house, mostly copied from somewhere or recreating and living out the cliché to the letter in their imagination.
The poor of course had the sanctity of tradition to uphold and would actually go deep within the recesses of popular culture to create motifs that usually had a meaning or reason to be there. Geometric designs, flora and fauna, heroes from epics, like Lord Rama and Krishna and Shiva and their consorts, wherein the major happenings from their lives would be recreated on walls, floors and cloth alike. These would also have a seasonal/ritualistic context and like all votive figures, a pre-ordained life span. Come the next season/harv-est/wedding/childbirth and the women would get to work again with paintbrushes and paints created from nature. Madhubanis, pattachitras, kolams, picchwais et all are the result of these creative and cultural forays and moorings.
The rich of course had the means to get individual attention and with exaggerated delusions of grandeur, get portraits of themselves painted in their Diwali best clothes. My favourite joke on the subject was the matron instructing the artist to paint more jewels on her than what she was actually wearing saying: “When I die, I want my daughter-in-law or souten to go berserk looking for the non-existent jewels and be miserable for the rest of their lives!” So much for legacy!
Havelis and palaces and homes of zamindars all over the country from Bengal to Gujarat and Kashmir to Kerala are replete with such portraits that served the dual purpose of vanity and historicity, since there were no cameras.
And even after the cameras arrived on the scene in a big way, superstitions about them abounded and ensured that the portrait artist never went out of business.
In fact, well-known artists of contemporary art even today find takers for “family portraits” which means creating replicas from pictures already shot. The setting is generally formal, complete with family dog and set against a grandiose backdrop with lavish and ornate furniture. Where the rich and famous are, how can politicians — the new maharajas — be far behind? More loyal than the king type of sycophants and situations have ensured that any number of government buildings from the Parliament House to the Rashtrapati Bhavan downwards are dotted with portraits of flavour of the month/season netas. That some of these portraits are of questionable quality, and aesthetics is perhaps another matter altogether.
But having said that, it would be equally important to remember that but for this visual chronicling, the faces that created history in whatever minor or major way would be lost forever. So even if it means having “court painters” who paint their subjects in sometimes more glorious avatars than realistically deserved, it is still a better option than not having anyone record! This brings me back to an important artistic query – does the painter see something that the camera is unable to capture? Is that “gaze” or “seeing” through the lens not exact a replica?
As fellow artists say, how can aura be captured through mere technology? Doesn’t the artists’ view of any person/landscape have something of his or perception in it? Isn’t that what separates a photograph from a painting? I have a different take on it. In my various sojourns as a journalist, author and editor of several publications I must have sifted through a few lakh photographs and an equal number of paintings as a curator over the last three decades. It is my experience that the old adage about one photograph being worth a thousand words is not too far wrong.
Before you get me wrong and send salvos in my direction for making you wade through so many words, let me hasten to add that while the tussle between the word or shabd and the image or bimb may be an old one, I find that the camera is a mere tool like a paint brush. It is the ability of the photographer as it is of the artist to capture and bring to the fore that defining moment where the persona of the person being photographed or painted is revealed, that sets the image apart and puts it in the galaxy of the great
like Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Henri Cartier Bresson’s portraits of Afghan women that still linger in my mindscape.
In my book Moment In Time With Legends of Indian Arts, I had very successfully used the skills of news photographers to do portraits of the greats of Indian music, dance, theatre and painting. The book is in its third reprint and even if I like to think that it was the magic of my words that did it, the fact is that, its success is shared in equal measure by the many photographers, whose work is part of the rare collection of both interviews and photographs.
The entire book is shot in black and white and the images have the feel of both immediacy and mobility that few colour photographs can have. As they say, viva a live the portrait, if not the man!

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist and can be contacted on alkaraghuvanshi@yahoo.com