FILMING PHOTOGRAPHY W I T H THE

MACDOUGALLS IN INDIA

AKOS OSTOR
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

Photo Wallahs {photomen, in Hindi), David and Judith

MacDougall's new film about photographers in the
Indian hill station of Mussoorie, is a delightful surprise
onfirstviewing, but upon subsequent encounters becomes
a probing, thoughtful exploration of visual image and
representation.1 It is a film about photography with
constant reminders of the difference between the two. It
is a film about a resort town in the foothills of the
Himalayas, about Indian aesthetics, about a universal
medium. It is enjoyable and entertaining from beginning
to end, yet it challenges conventional wisdom about
fieldwork, ethnographic representation, and the relation
between film and anthropology.
The film plays on actuality and appearance on many
levels, in many contexts. It deals with pictures in
succession, it contrasts photographs,films,and television,
but most of all it tells us about the image of frozen
moments in black-and-white and color, through motion.
The reflections of film on photography give images a
poignancy, both in their fixed permanence and the
unstable cycle within which we encounter photographs:
a headlong rush towards the past and memory.
The film explores processes touching all aspects of
photography from exposure to printing: studio and labwork, field trips, taking and making images of all kinds,
color and black-and-whiteprints, retouchingand coloring
by hand, polaroids, photo albums and individual
reminiscences, street-photographers, posing in different

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contexts (holidays, marriage negotiations, weddings,

and studios), photographs as identity cards and records
of missing persons. Throughout we have the reflections
ofphotographers on the nature of their work, on art, craft
and the market, on changes in fashion and preference
over time. These men speak with intensity and
unquestioned commitment, they discuss aesthetics, the
tastes and demands of customers, their own choices and
compromises, the relation of photography to painting,
verisimilitude and mimesis, and the mass production of
images.
There are some discussions among the photographers
themselves but the monologues are in fact conversations
with the filmmakers, even if we rarely hear the latter's
question. Most often we hear xhephoto wallahs'responses
and reflections assembled into narratives by the
MacDougalls. But this is not at all jarring because what
we are told does not depend on the intrusion of the
filmmakers. The comments may be provoked by the
MacDougalls but they reveal the ideas and convictions of
the photographers, who seem to welcome the opportunity
to take a moment out of the daily bustle in their bazaar
studios and reflect on the longer view with kindred souls.
The MacDougalls have an obvious affection for their
partners in conversation and thedelicacy of theirprobing,
even if unseen, is always in evidence.
For all their concern with photography the
MacDougalls have made zfilm: there is a balance between

Visual Anthropology Review

A STREET PHOTOGRAPHER AT WORK. I N PHOTO

WALLANS.

still and moving images, silence and sound, proving that

one can make a film about photography that is moving
(in every sense) which does not remain just a set of
photographs on film.
The film starts with a medium shot: a photographer
is posing three boys in a studio. We see him from the
back as he turns on the lights and says good," sounds
intrude from the outside, and all the while the boys arc
staring at us. Cut to the final product: a black-and-white

Visual Anthropology Review

photograph. Titles appear: Photo Wallahs: an encounter

with photography in Mussoone, a North Indian hill station.
Cut to a high angle shot of Mussoorie town, with mist
rising up in the hills, the sound of temple bells. A closeup pan of kids staring intently into the camera, silent and
intense. A shopkeeper opens his doors and carries out
life-size cardboard cutouts of famous figures, saying,
these look like photos but they are not. Cut to a closeup of a tractor passing in a telcphoto shot, with a row o I

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shops and passersby looming behind. Close-up of a

clock in the window of an antique store, cut to the
shopkeeper in a medium shot, tilt down to a batch of
photographs in his hands. As the dealer reflects about
people's preference for old photographs he flips through
pictures of royalty, landscapes, ceremonies, hunts and
military camps. A tracking shot follows the shopkeeper
to a crowded bureau where he pulls out, with some
difficulty, a plastic bag full of photographs, producing a
"special" one of "real gold," the portrait of an unknown
maharaja. In the next shot he brings a "beautiful old
album" from which all the pictures are missing: "someone
removed them." He slowly leafs through the stiffpages
with their empty squares and ovals. Cut to a fair in a
bazaar: an elephant is made to sit and the decorations on
his trunk are touched up with fresh paint. Kids reach and
touch, captivated with the elephant but looking at the
camera. Cut to a woman displaying colorful calendars
and prints. A panning shot takes in a group staring at
something completely absorbed: some are caught open
mouthed, the unmistakable sounds of a music, and a
man, lost to the world, heaves a big sigh. The crowd is
watching television, an episode from the immensely
popular Mahabharata series. Oh charitable Karna, says
a plaintive female voice, forgive thy mother! The music
flows over the next cut: a cable car rises slowly along a hill
side, arrives at its destination, people pour out at the top
of a clearing only to be accosted by photographers.
Close-up of a woman looking into a mirror and applying
lipstick, the reflection of a man appears briefly in the
background. A series of humorous scenes follow with
people putting on costumes, head dresses, sunglasses,
posing for photographers high up on a hill top in front
of a small photo stand, with snow-covered Himalayan
peaks for background.
An enjoyable, well-paced beginningyet one profound
with its constant play on image, reflection, appearance,
and representation through different media, in different
contexts. We see photographers posing their subjects
formally as if making a record of a life at one moment,
noting a stage of life, a particular age, an occasion, an
anniversary, a status, or a presence in a liminal place
made exotic through the timeless fantasies of film and
television. We see the studio process: posing for the
camera, the decisive role of the professional, the serious
looks yet complicity of the subject, the still images in
black-and-white, and color. Very different images at

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that. The cardboardfiguresdeceive in their photographic

likeness. Couples pose, unsmiling, in terms of unstated
expectations. The old photographs are of people who
posed at one time or another and are now unknown.
Untitled photographs of strange, appealing ceremonies,
removed in time, show the way things were for the
powerful and privileged, but no longer photographs of
record or identity, nor even of events known and kept for
memory, only pictures of some historical curiosity,
nostalgia for worlds lost and longed for. Perhaps even
photographs of evidence for an historian of culture or a
student of photography. But it is a film we see: the
photographs come to us at an angle, as people hold them,
as they fall like leaves, as others see them, or as the
filmmakers single them out for us, at eyelevel, enormously
enlarged," posters for special attention. Photographs
indeed, but changed in space and in time at the behest of
film.
The steady succession of photographs is poignant,
permanent and transitory: a vanished past, changing
moments in a life cycle, melancholy of faded fineries,
pastimes of nameless princes and officials, uncertain yet
hopeful school boys, stern husbands and wives. We
don't just see a parade ofphotos, we see as the MacDougalls
and their photo wallahswant us to see: pictures ofpictures,
different in tone, surface, and appearance, blown up to
proportions no conventional photograph can aspire to,
but at other times the pictures are in a social context, as
if we were leafing through someone else's past, or were
present at a gathering, sharing memories. Along with the
photos we get the studios, the lights, the coaching of the
photographer, the embarrassed tension ofposingsubjects,
the street noises as well as the entire present in which
photographs, old and new, are consumed and
contemplated.
There is a rhythm to the photographs succeeding
each other at an angle, close up, at a distance; photos
past, photos present; pictures representing, identifying,
recording, revealing, recalling all participating in the
genius or nature of photography, yet being shown on
film, in a different cultural context, to viewers half a
world away. The moving visual images are of all kinds,
an assault on the eye and ear that is India viewed. Images
painted, printed, photographed, filmed, taped; images
in studios, in tourist spots, at fairs, on the trunk of
elephants, in garish calendars, and in the imponderabilia
of everyday life on film.

Visual Anthropology Review

Mussoorie itself is a liminal space one at the end

of a precipitous train or a bus ride, suspended among the
lower peaks of the Himalayas, a place of repose and
fantasy. Originally a refuge for the British fleeing the
heat ofthe plains, now in more democratic times still a
hierarchical gathering of holiday makers (and traders,
hoteliers) belonging to all classes and castes. A place of
leisure and fancy, one to commemorate in photographs,
a place where inhibitions are shed and somber citizens
dress up as idealized thieves, peasants, ruffians, kings and
bards.
In the sequence at end ofthe cable car ride, on the
top ofthe hill, holiday makers pose against mountains
real and painted on the studio canvasses. The scene is
laden with possibilities about image and reality,
appearance and expectation, but at the same time it gives
us a play on visual reflection and representation full of
charm and the wisdom of everyday life.
A Sikh photo wallah remarks that the right clothing
gives the right feeling: close-up of a turban being rolled
up and wrapped around the head ofa prospective Punjabi
warrior. Turbans of all kinds and of all possible ethnic
variations. An embarrassed young man, dressed up in
fineries, is being encouraged with good humor: dance!
they are making a movie! Hesitant dance steps, tentative
smile and the comment: I only know Hindi (movie)
dance. The sequence is pure Bombay cinema, or rather
"Hindi filim" as enacted by visitors to Mussoorie,
complete with costume, gesture, song and table top
percussion. There are no orchestra and playback singer,
only the cracked twanging ofan old guitar and the expert
illusion-making of the, photo wallahs as they fashion their
subjects into film heroes and heroines.
Street scenes separate a different set of reflections on
photography. We come to Glamour Studio where
another photographer poses a couple for a husband and
wife portrait. As the black-and-white print appears
before us the artist comments that he does not like color.
A succession of black-and-white photographs follows:
portraits of couples from every possible social and ethnic
background, every possible age group. There are serious,
official-looking pictures, records of marriages at a
particular moment made timeless and without context in
the collection ofthe photographer. These are self images
yet made with the collaboration of the photographer:
representations of idealized or accepted relationships,
documents ofthe way we look now, the way we looked

Visual Anthropology Review

then, preferred by families throughout India. These are

genealogical records for kinship and family purposes, but
they are not just documentary identities, rather cultural
accounts ofthe looks and expectations. The film shows
the process of this fashioning and refashioning with the
aesthetics, economics, and society of photographer and
subject in a dialectical encounter, till the approved
product is arrived at. Only the ones that are good and
you like will be charged for one couple is told.
The filmmakers play with images in other ways as
well. The cable car's shadow on the hillside precedes our
view of the car itself; women look through a telescope
and then the view itself appears in a telephoto shot; a
man's face is obliterated by a camera as he takes pictures,
other faces are reflected in the mirrors and sunglasses. A
street photographer stalks his prey and suddenly whips
out his album of samples from under his coat, revealing
stiffly posed would-be film heroes and heroines. The
entire process of low-tech instant photography on the
street is faithfully followed from the lens cap being
removed to expose a picture in the large box camera, to
the negative being retouched and the print developed in
a bucket and handed over to a satisfied customer. All this
takes place around a stool in the street a charming way
of recalling the early days of photography, a masterly
lesson in the difficult craft of making a simple process
film (an economical and comprehensible visual
description: a task too often failed by the filmmakers),
and an anthropological interpretation of a social fact:
photography is still continuous with its earliest days, the
equipment and processes used a hundred years ago are
serviceable today in Mussoorie's system of supply and
demand. Pictures are transformed into living fantasy
and expectation as the Sikh photo wallah sings and
accompanies himselfon the improvised drums of a metal
tabletop, with shots alternating between posing subjects
and photographs till the two become indistinguishable
through the mediation of film. Stillness and appearances
deceive at other times when, for example, the close-up of
flowers moves from afieldto a carefully retouched blackand-white print, or a young woman's pose for a matchmaking photograph turns out to be the composition
rather than the photograph itself.
As in most MacDougall films conversations count,
although here the rhythm ofthe words does not move the
film forward as the transport mechanism. The words are
memorable: some are addressed to the filmmakers and

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Two

OF MUSSOORIE'S PHOTOGRAPHERS. IN PHOTO WALLAHS.

remain non-intrusive because they reveal so clearly the

ideas and beliefs of their protagonists. An elegant old
lady (who later refers to herself, in passing, as the
daughter-in-law of Kapurthalas Maharaja) leafs through
an old album and speaks, with a small laugh, about the
strangeness of old photographs, her past life as something
alien to the present. Anecdotes come with each picture,
told with fondness and humor, but no sentimentality.
The sequence contrasts with earlier ones featuring empty
albums and unidentified photographs here the stories
enliven the parade of images with a living, narrative,
family context. An old Sikh photographer speaks of tone
and verisimilitude in retouched black-and-white photos:
tinting black-and-white prints is meant to achieve a
realistic effect. The, photo wallahs, at an outing into the
countryside, findsubjects oftheir own choosing and talk
about the realism of photography, the limits of likeness,
and the esthetics of customers. Photographs can be more
beau tiful than reality, says one, because the photographer

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makes a selection from among many alternatives. But

there is a responsibility, adds another, to be life-like: one
should not go beyond realism. The process of selection
is shown by the men climbing up on scooters, closing in
on sweets frying in a pan, following a man and ox
ploughing all to the bemusement of local bystanders.
A writer reads passages from his work; grandmother is
looking at an old picture and her grandchild is pestering
her with many questions. She does not answer, and in a
reverie remarks to herself, wondering, whose hands
appear above a wall behind the little girl in the photograph.
Our interest here is in the narrative and the film: the
reading is continuous buttheshots are separated by black
leader, the MacDougalls calling attention to the
fragmenting of reality in the photographs, filmed
photography, text, and diegetic actuality. Thescene is an
almost uncanny repetition of an earlier, non-fiction
sequence in the film, where an old lady is looking at an
album with her grandchildren (and the MacDougalls)

Visual Anthropology Review

and wondering whether or not she is the little girl in the

picture.
The scenes of nostalgia and (fading) memory in
photographs contrast sharply with the matter of fact
sequence from television reporting on missing persons
with its tattered pictures of stiffly posing people. Here
the photograph acts to identify and locate: the several
sides of recording, putting under surveillance, and
remembering. The pictures recall the fragility of lives,
people misplaced, out ofcontext, discarding or acquiring
lives. The photographs are the only link between phases
ofalife, with thepithy commentary on the TV soundtrack
noting the name, age, and "appearance" (tall or short) of
persons. The sequence is powerful: it gives poignancy
and a different context to the photographs we saw earlier.
One should not ask of this film: is this an
anthropological, or ethnographic, or non-fiction, or
whatever film. A simple answer would be that it is
anthropological because it is made by anthropologists.
And so for the rest of the items on the listbut none of
that would tell us what is the film all about. Photo Wallahs
is not easily categorized. It is not a visual ethnography of
a place, although it tells us a lot about Mussoorie. It
deals, directly or indirectly, with concepts of
representation and symbolism, and provides
interpretations. It presents segments of society, and
explores practices and ideas. It tells us about liminality,
reality, and myth-making as effectively as any monograph,
with the difference that we see the levels ofmediation and
are invited to interpret the interpreters. It tells us about
fieldwork with a simultaneity of the event and
interpretation. It takes an unusual group (photographers)
in an unexpected place (an Indian resort town). Its
subject is the by now universal practice of photography,
but we are offered photography in particular, in a given
locality. We tend to forget that such a universal is only
assumed to be so, and always comes in a place and a
context, usually European or North American. Here we
get images and thoughts about Indian history, colonialism,
social systems, aesthetics, mass culture, as well as changing
ideas and practices in photography. But beyond all this

Visual Anthropology Review

the film is a tribute to the power and ideal of photography,

to the passionate involvement and love of a few old
hands. The photo wallahs we meet certainly try to make
aliving, someare technological optimists, others welcome
the impact of video, and one at least wonders about the
loss of ideals. The older ones prefer black-and-white and
retouching for mimetic potential, the younger ones like
polaroid and color for much the same reason. They have
specific views on photography and although they
contradict each other the MacDougalls include them all
without favor or prejudice.
One final consideration: early in the film I wondered
why the speakers were not named. Soon I realized that
subtitling a name and occupation or other detail about a
person would hardly add to our understanding. Titles
here would identify, record, and control just the way
missing-persons' photographs are treated on the TV
screen. The obsession with listing names and other
details may be just that, at best a way ofproviding crucial
data where needed and appropriate, at worst merely
objectifying, stereotyping, and limiting a person. The
people who speak to us in the course of the film establish
themselves as persons rather than categories in a
classifactory project. The MacDougalls rely on image
and sound, allowing the speakers to present their thoughts,
feelings, and work, and so to present themselves.

NOTES

1. I thank David MacDougall for sending me his

reflections on the film. However, due to a series of
circumstances I could not read David's account before
writing mine.
I should note here that Photo Wallahs is an interpretive
film. However, the visual description and meaning are
in the filming and editing, so in writing about the film I
shall not separate description from interpretation.
Nevertheless, the reader should be aware that in doing so
I am inevitably putting forward my own interpretation
of the film.

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