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What initially drewyou to the box of photographs?
Alan:
We were at an estate sale of a man who
collected old photographs. We saw this box sitting
under a couch and pulled it out. Inside the box were
photographs. The quality was spectacular. They were
not simple snapshots; they were beautiful studies
and portraits.
Jerri:
We said, “Oh, that’ll fit right in to our
photography collection!” It was twenty dollars
for one-hundred-twenty-seven photographs with
negatives that were taken in India. We knew it was
in India, because the captions were very generic,
for example, “Indian man.”
Alan:
We collect photographs, and my training is
in anthropology, so we have a big ethnographic
collection of photographs anyway. So this fit just
perfectly.
What is the significance of inviting contemporary
artists to respond to these photographs?
Jerri:
When we came back from our initial trip
to India, the Martha Schneider Gallery was doing
an exhibition on the photograph as object. We
were invited to take part in that exhibit, so we took
these photographs and made these artworks based
on the images. We started to realize that they are
really very powerful and can be used to create new
contemporary art. We wanted to gather a group of
Indian artists, and ourselves, to create contemporary
art based on these photographs. We know how we
respond to the images; we wanted to see how Indian
artists would respond. So we had a photographer, a
filmmaker, an installation artist, a graphic artist, a
folk artist… everyone responded in an incredibly
different way.
How do you think these photographs were
perceived by contemporary Indian artists?
Jerri:
I think the photographs really spoke to our
contemporary artists. In that era, you would have an
outsider, a Westerner, come in and photograph the
exoticism of India: the cow walking down the street,
the snake charmer, the beautiful women in their
saris. These photographs by the unknown soldier
are different. He was interested in such a broad
spectrum of the everyday life of the Bengalis. Instead
of focusing on the exoticism, he photographed
ordinary people. To see that photographed by a
foreigner, especially before independence, when
Indians were under British rule and seen as second-
class citizens, it was very unusual to have someone
take such respectful photographs.
How is the nature of a cross-cultural exhibition
relevant to our contemporary climate?
Alan:
It’s difficult for a lot of Americans to realize
that we are a wonderful country, a fantastic, stellar
country, but we are one of many countries. There are
other people, and they have different points of view.
Those points of view are what makes life interesting.
No one point of view can tell the whole story, but by
melding different points of view we can get a more
honest understanding of the world.
Jerri:
We all come with our own heritage, our own
DNA, and our own life experiences. As artists that’s
our background, and that’s what we produce. We are
who we are, and we produce the art based on that.
One of the artists in the exhibition, Sanjeet
Chowdhury, created a video called
Letters to Rachel
.
In this video, he pretended that he was a Jewish
American soldier from Baltimore in 1945 who
was in the service and was going around taking
photographs and writing letters to his sweetheart
back home whose name was Rachel. He narrates
the letters and shows the pictures that he is talking
about, saying, “See the temples that I am visiting
are very much like our temple back home.” And
so here is this Indian artist in 2016, pretending
he’s Jewish and from Baltimore, reporting on the
Hindus from seventy years ago. He is coming with
his contemporary point of view, but he’s placing
himself in the shoes of a person with a different