AN INTIMATE JOURNEY THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHS, |SEMANA DA CULTURA
Wino-PORTWBWESN, 00.
Presents
an Exhibition of
Old Goan Photographs
Moments,
Memory &
Memorabilia
Collated & Curated
by Savia Viegas
he photographic image played a central role in the visual history of
the changing world of the 1840s. It was a world that was colonially
inscribed; its geographies redefined and culturally re-
conglomerated. It was a world of centres and peripheries linked by power,
trade and colonisation. These new political groups had intense activities
that linked the axis to the margins and these fringes to each other wherein
goods, flora and fauna were relocated. People too moved across immense
distances either for work opportunities or propelled by destiny.
The invention in 1839 of two methods of permanently-capturing images on
metal or paper —daguerreotype or producing an image on paper which
was tonally and laterally reversed — changed the way images were made
and produced. The photograph was a response to a social and cultural
hunger for accurate and real-looking images, whose origins Naomi
Rosenblum, the photography historian, locates in the Renaissance.
From then on, the processes, techniques and subjects of photography
have changed and evolved.
As Coco Fusco, director of Graduate Studies for the Visual Arts, Columbia
University writes: “We are increasingly reliant on photographs for information
about histories and realities that we do not experience directly. By looking at
pictures we imagine that we can know who we are and who we were.”This Exhibition seeks to offer a perspective of the history of Goa mirrored
through a clutch of old photographs. As we view the images in this
exhibition, questions will crop up in the minds of some of the viewers:
Why are the common people not in these photographs?
Why there are no photographs of Muslim families and those of minorities?
Colonialism has left its tell-tale marks on our societies, creating different
cultural metaphors for different cultural groups, changing and evolving with
the passage of time. These photographs reflect these stark imprints of
times gone by, exposing and delving into some common trends. In each
Photograph, the identifiable and defined cues as the camera faced its
subjects: the distance between the photographer and the posers in the
foreground, the pose, clothes and other cultural artefacts coupled with the
objects, human and inanimate, in the background, all reflect the unique
aesthetics and conventions of the times
The Estado of the Portuguese empire was a tiny stretch of shoreline
spread across three zones in western India namely Goa, Daman and Diu.