Karen Knorr

Schedule | International Conference on Photography of India

31st January 2012

Inauguration of Exhibitions – Pradyumna Vyas, Director, National Institute of Design

1700 hrs      T S Satyan – Recorder of Life, Beauty and Truth, Aquarium | NID & Tasveer

1730 hrs     Travelling Light, Foyer | Maria Kapajeva

1745 hrs     ‘+91’ Graduate Students Exhibition, Old Canteen | Richa & Soumyadip

1st February 2012

0900 hrs     Registration

0930 hrs     Inauguration & opening address | Pradyumna Vyas, Director, NID

1000 hrs     Session I Photography and Photography Education

Shahidul Alam                               Drik | Bangladesh

Nayland Blake                               International centre of Photography (ICP) | USA

Anna Fox                                      University for Creative Arts (UCA) | UK

Annu Palakunnathu Matthew           University of Rhode Island | USA

Pablo Barthelomeow                       Photographer | India

1130 hrs Tea Break

1145 hrs     Session II Photography and Photography Education

Sunil Gupta                             Photographer, Curator | India

David Moore                          Central Saint Martin College of Art& Design | UK

Peter Sramek                          Ontario College of Art & Design University | Canada

Deepak John Mathew               National Institute of Design Ahmedabad

1300 hrs     Lunch Break

1400 hrs     Session III Connecting the World – Collaborative Projects and Exchanges

Lucida                                  Photographer’s Collective | India

Maria, Peter & Chinar            Collaborative Project | India, UK, Canada, Brazil

& Finland

Andrew Bruce & Shilpa Gavane     Academic Exchange | NID-UCA

Nayantara                             Photo Circle | Nepal

Maniyarasan R & Rahul SR    History of Indian Photography | NID

1530 hrs     Tea Break

1545 hrs               Session IV Photography and Practice

Karen Knorr                                      Photographer | UK

Vivek Vilasini                                    Photographer | India

Nandini Valli                                     Photographer | India

Magi Viljanen                                    Photographer | Finland

Neeta Madahar                                   Photographer | UK

2nd February, 2012

0930 hrs             Session V Photography and Research

Esa Epstein                                        Sepia Eye | USA

Sabeena Gadihoke                              Researcher, Jamia University | India

Anusha Yadav                                    Photographer, Researcher | India

Johny ML                                         Art Critic, Curator & Writer | India

1100 hrs     Tea Break

1115 hrs     Session VI Photography and Dissemination

Abhishek Poddar                            Gallerist | India

Aditya Arya                                  Photographer, Researcher | India

Radhika Singh                               Gallerist | India

Prasant Panjiar                               Photojournalist | India

1300 hrs     Lunch Break

1430 hrs     City of Photos/Three Women and a Camera (Documentary @ Auditorium)

Inside Out III (Closed session at Board Room exclusively for delegates)

1400 hrs      Photography Education in India, UK and USA- Perspectives

1700 hrs     Tea Break

1715 hrs     Concluding Session (Auditorium)

CONFÉRENCES / RENCONTRES le 29 et 30/10/2010 – Centre photographique d’Ile de France COLLOQUE : LA PHOTOGRAPHIE
CONTEMPORAINE EN FRANCE, HISTOIRE ET PERSPECTIVES
LA PHOTOGRAPHIE CONTEMPORAINE : HISTOIRES ET PERSPECTIVES Vendredi 29 et samedi 30 octobre
Programme détaillé ci-après
À l’occasion de son 20eme anniversaire et en liaison avec les travaux consacrés à la photographie à l’Université Paris 1, le Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France et l’Equipe d’accueil Histoire sociale et culturelle de l’art sont partenaires d’un colloque qui vise à faire un point sur la création photographique en France depuis une trentaine d’années, soit une période marquée par « la photographie contemporaine ».
Quel fut le contexte d’une création qui a fait de l’art contemporain le lieu de la consécration sociale du photographe ? Comment la France s’inscrit-elle alors dans un contexte international qui voit la photographie envahir les lieux artistiques, le marché et mobilise l’action des pouvoirs publics ? Cette période est unique dans l’histoire tant elle tranche avec les difficultés de reconnaissance qu’a connues la photographie dans le passé.
Cette légitimité acquise, comment s’est affirmée une critique, comment se sont déroulés les débats, comment s’est opérée une distinction avec les autres pratiques photographiques ? Comment s’est transmis cet héritage dans les années 1990-2000 ? Quelles places pour la politique dans l’image, les recherches expérimentales sur le médium, la relation aux autres formes d’expression ? La photographie contemporaine a-t-elle définitivement extrait la photographie d’un microcosme d’amateurs ? A-t-elle en revanche oublié les pratiques populaires ?
Autant de questions auxquelles tenteront de répondre historiens, critiques et surtout artistes, pour observer la création la plus contemporaine à la lumière d’une aventure encore récente.
// PROGRAMME Vendredi 29 octobre Matinée 9h30 : Introduction par Nathalie Giraudeau et Michel Poivert
9h45 : Marie Gautier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Le rôle de la critique d’art contemporain des années 1960 et 1970 dans la construction théorique et critique de la photographie
10h15 : Quentin Bajac (Musée national d’art moderne) Quelle histoire ? La photographie française contemporaine à travers la politique d’acquisitions du Musée national d’art moderne, de 1977 à nos jours.
Pause
11h00 : Emmanuel Hermange (Ecole supérieure d’art de Grenoble) La photographie de rue : les mutations d’un genre
11h30 : Vincent Lavoie (Université du Québec à Montréal) La création photographique contemporaine : laboratoire d’une critique des images de presse
12h00-12h30 : débat Après-midi
14h30 : Présentation des débats et entretiens animés par Nathalie Giraudeau, Michel Poivert et Patrick Talbot.
14h45 : Entretien avec Jean-Luc Moulène 15h30 : Entretien avec Suzanne Lafont Pause 16h30 : Table ronde en présence de Pierre Leguillon, Bruno Serralongue, Simon Boudvin.
Samedi 30 octobre 10h15 : Accueil des Participants
10h30 : Michel Poivert (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) Une histoire de la photographie contemporaine en France.
11h00 : Pascal Beausse (Centre national des Arts plastiques) Le photographe comme self-media
11h30 : Dominique Sagot-Duvauroux (Université d’Angers) Le marché des tirages contemporain, structure et analyse.
12h00-12h30 : Débat Après-midi
14h30 : Présentation des débats et entretiens animés par Nathalie Giraudeau, Michel Poivert et Patrick Talbot.
14h45 : Entretien avec Gilles Saussier
15h30 : Entretien avec Karen Knorr
Pause 16h30 : Table ronde en présence de Valérie Belin, Carole Fékété, Patrick Tosani. INFORMATIONS PRATIQUES Vendredi 29 octobre
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art 6, rue des Petits Champs
75002 – Paris Samedi 30 octobre
Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France 107, avenue de la République 77 340 – Pontault-Combault
Pour toute information complémentaire : 01 70 05 49 80

HotBlog: Fresh Perspectives on Contemporary Photography
A Site for Sore Eyes
Mini Q & A with the curator of Milan’s Museum of Contemporary Photography about Karen Knorr’s work, Fables Posted on August 31, 2010 |
In the following Q & A, Stella Maranesi talks to curator Roberta Valtorta about Karen Knorr‘s 2003-2008 work, Fables, currently on show at the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Milan, Italy. The exhibition includes 11 photographs and the video work, Ariadne, (2008).
The Green Bedroom Louise XVI 2004-2007, © Karen Knorr/Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea Cinisello Balsamo-Milano
The Music Room 2004-2007, © Karen Knorr/Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea Cinisello Balsamo-Milano
In the Green Room, © Karen Knorr/Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea Cinisello Balsamo-Milano
In the light of Knorr’s recent work, Muses and Avatar (2009), it’s interesting to reconsider Fables, in which the representation of animals, instead of humans, suggests a deeper use of digital manipulation (as animals can’t be
directed in the same way as humans). In these works, the stories are constructed through a dialogue between the characters, represented in the paintings in the museum, and the animals which have been digitally added by the artist.
You chose to only include works of Knorr’s that feature animals rather than humans, what led you to do this?
Roberta Valtorta: We intentionally focused on the animals, which was in agreement with the artist. Knorr’s series are so extensive and drawn out over time, it allows different choices for different exhibitions. There is, what I consider, an extreme relationship between the animals (wild ones, at that) and places of art, history, richness and power into which they break. This relationship is, in my opinion, particularly significant, as it suggests a reflection on contemporary life, on the frailty of material things. As a memento mori, Knorr’s works recall the serious theme of the relation between nature and culture in contemporary society.
Do you think that the video, Ariadne, is in line with the still pictures or does it challenge the question of nature and culture in a different way?
Roberta Valtorta: I think it is well integrated with the nature-culture
theme. It takes it one step further, thanks to its direct and raw confrontation between the big spider and the well-consolidated figures of the history of art; between the sudden movements of this, often unpleasant and extraneous, creature and the “beautiful”, absolute, “untouchable” forms of art.
Knorr combines digital and analogue, how important is this aspect of her work? Are the human figures real or the result of a montage? Do you think that in the works that involve animals there is more digital manipulation compared to the ones with only humans?
Roberta Valtorta: Karen Knorr really wants to melt together analogue and digital approaches to photography in order to question both methods of representation, in a similar way as she does with nature and culture. It’s a dialectic relation that questions the very concept of image. The recent works, carried out in Spain, are staged showing naked human figures. In the works with animals, there is more digital manipulation, however, some of them are depicted from life while other animals have been embalmed. This difference in treatment, however, is not so important, because everything in Knorr’s works is planned and strongly constructed, be it through real poses or, I would say, the “digital pose”. Conceptually in photography, a physical
display and a virtual one are not that far apart. Personally, I’ve always found strong similarities between a staged analogue photo and a digital one. Staging can occur physically, or virtually, there is not a strong conceptual difference between the two.

Email Conversation with Anna Fox July 27- Aug 27 2010

KK Today I am about to embark on an airplane back to London. I am in Delhi, it is the monsoon and raining July 27, 2010.When did you first travel to India? Has travel to India affected your practice as a photographer? Maybe this is a way of beginning a conversation about photography, our own practices as women photographers. I hope you will have time to have an email conversation with me about your experiences in India and its culture.
I have just returned to London after my fourth trip to India. I seem to only scratch the surface of what is such an ancient and diverse culture incorporating all the world religions : Hindu, Buddhism, Jain, Parsee, Islam, Christian and Judaism. Migrations from as far as Greece, Asia Minor and China have influenced the religious cultural practices, infusing India’s architecture and visual culture as well as its stories from the Vedas to Bollywood. It is this fluidity and hybridity that I that made me feel comfortable. I am fascinated and curious about all the contradictions that cultural fusions entail. Remember, I grew up in Puerto Rico, in the 1960’s, an island which was also culturally mixed : Taino Indians, Spanish, African and American. A tropical climate warm and humid cooled by the tradewinds blowing off the central mountain range covered with tropical rainforest . I always miss the West Indies and the Caribbean .

AF Hi Karen – I first travelled to India when I was a student in 1985. I was studying with Martin Parr and Paul Graham as tutors and I went to India for two reasons, firstly to visit the home of one of my peers, my good friend Jazvinder Singh, and secondly to take photographs along the way. It was a mad trip and it became clear quite quickly that poor Jaz was not well, I mean had not been well for a long time, and this combined with my first experience outside of Europe made the trip an extraordinary one. We also had a friend from Manchester with us, a regular hippy Freddy was keen like me to make the pilgrimage to the grandest hippy destination of all times. We arrived in Bombay (as it was then) mid July, mid monsoon. We had been warned by traveller friends that this was the worst possible time to go but nothing could have prepared us for the smells and sights of a mid 1980’s Bombay night. The first thing I remember as we emerged from the airport was seeing half a dozen westerners lying on the floor in the entranceway to the airport, all incredibly emaciated, guys with long beards begging for money – they looked out of it.
“Brown sugar” someone murmured, “they probably want to get home” someone else volunteered, I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, the idea of not being able to get home was shocking, I had never been so close to seeing it. I was wearing a cotton dress and sandals, the road was thick with mud and I saw rats, a man grabbed our luggage and locked it in the back of his black and yellow cab, it was all a bit too fast for us and we panicked, thinking he was stealing out luggage – typical western anxiety! He hurried us on, it was 4 am and the wind was warm enough to feel like it was coming out of a hairdryer on low speed. The country amazed me – it was magical, chaotic
and life changing.
AF When did you first go to India? What were your first impressions?

KK I travelled to India very recently, only two years ago and it was thanks to your enthusiasm for India that I considered making work for the first time in a country I was unfamiliar with. I may have broken my own rules and risk plunging into a “new orientalism”, in my new work, a risk I am now willing to take! You suggested I contact Abhishek Poddar of Tasveer Arts , which I first did by writing him an email as I was travelling to India in October 2008. Unfortunately we did not meet during that first trip yet communicated by email. It was only during my second trip in April 2009 that I met Abhishek and was invited to stay at the family home in Bangalore. It is thanks to both your encouragement that I embarked upon a life changing experience using photography as a means of understanding the complexities of India and its cultural heritage. The Poddars have been the most generous friends, introducing me to people such as Shivi Singh who helped me gain access to palace sites and photograph them. Travelling to India I continue to climb a steep learning curve, each time I learn something new! What interested me most from a post-colonial perspective was the pre-British architectural heritage permeated by India’s Mughal past in Northern India. I wanted to consider women’s space in the zanana, in palaces and havelis, the area where upper caste women conducted their lives away from the gaze of men. The organization of the space around the mardana (men’s areas) intrigued me. The screens that women could look down at the meetings and discussions in the durbar halls; the possibility that women commented and discussed men’s actions from behind these screens, that they could also resist or comment on power; the animal life in the palaces: elephants, cows, bulls, langur monkeys, tigers and cheetahs which lived close. Animal life is disappearing at a rapid rate as forests found at the base of mountains continue to be cut down or sites developed for the raw materials that are feeding India’s development. There are fewer cows and bulls in the cities as rapid urbanization and road building takes hold. Also the forests once full of wildlife in the Aravali Hills are now threatened by development as are the Western Ghats.
I had read William Darymple’s books and found his excavation of Indian history very exciting, particularly the book The Last Mughal which was incredibly timely in its depth of research. I have read Stanley Wolpert’s India and Sen’s The Argumentative Indian. A book that captured my imagination was Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus about her travels following the river Indus upstream in Pakistan and back in time. To think that now that same river is overflowing and millions of people are homeless just shows how fragile countries in developing world are even with nuclear power.
These books captured my imagination and made me want to explore India and visit Delhi. I researched different architectural and archeological sites on the internet and found photographs which were extremely useful. I wanted to know more about the Mughal Empire which ruled large swathes of India from the 16th to the 19th century. Islamic influence was already present in Delhi
and Agra in the 11th century with the Delhi Sultanate, the incredibly erudite scientific research that took place in India under Emperors such as Ashoka and Akbar, with an incredibly inclusive world view which supported different religions and philosophies! Not at all the orientalist European phantasy of the despot!
I know what you mean about travellers and people sleeping outdoors on sidewalks and on train platforms. Very impressive arriving at Delhi train station with hundreds of people lying on the floor waiting for their trains. My first impressions were of a woman asleep on the cool marble floors of the women’s toilets in Delhi airport with rings on her bare feet … and the enveloping heat. During our first journey, Juliette Wilson (my travelling companion and dear friend) and I had a very tight schedule. From New Delhi as we hired a driver through an Indian travel company who was to drive us 3,000 miles back and forth across Rajasthan. We identified many of the architectural sites including palaces, temples and mausoleums dating from the 14th century onwards were in this region of India that later became the heritage sites I used in India Song. We decided to visit 16 different sites in 21 days which included two bird sanctuaries …a very intense travel rhythm with Annu Kapoor , a virtual stranger who became our friend and whom we trusted with our lives!
I remember vividly our exit out of Delhi with thousands of motorcyclists, animals, trucks some of which were heading straight at us, in and out of the city . That first week of October 2008 seemed unreal being in India as the global markets dipped in and the Great Recession began to take hold in Britain. The idea was to reconnaissance architectural sites that I could photograph in the near future with a large format Sinar 5 x 4 in. I was impressed by the animal life and the close proximity of animals to humans in cities such as Delhi, Jodphur, Jaipur and Udaipur. It was wonderful traveling with Juliette who took notes while I photographed potential sites, sharing an overwhelming cornucopia of the senses that traveling through remote country villages to Samode Palace near Jaipur and then to Shekawati, at the edges of the Thar desert to Bikaner, down southwest Rajasthan to Udaipur … to Lake Pichola , staying on an island palace yet moving on constantly…exhausting …arriving at Agra to view the national symbol of India: the Taj Mahal. I guess we fulfilled the stereotype of rich woman travelers! Travel was work and our intellectual parameters were stretched by the visual and aural spectacle of north west India. The more I saw the more curious I became. Geoff Blight, my partner and I traveled twice to India in 2009 taking the large format Sinar camera with us and photographed palaces in Samode, Jaipur, Dungarpur and Udaipur. Contemporary India in rapid development exists in the past, present and future all at once: a camel, an ox, three people on a motor scooter, a pile of dried cow dung used for fuel next to vast telecommunication mobile towers which connect you to the internet and the mobile phone network even in the Thar desert.
KK But do tell me more about your photographs in India…

AF My first photographs in India were about observing the way extraordinary things crashed together in front of my eyes: influences from east and west; living conditions rich and poor. I was astounded by the level of innovation and creativity people were using to get by – strange machines made out of odds and ends, ways of getting from one place to the next, recycling everywhere. And the animals living in a way I had not seen before: cows and dogs wandering around , more content than not, some ill but many more in good health. I really felt there was
something to be said with photography, something enormously rich, something soulful that counteracted the greed of the consumer driven west.
I was shocked when I returned home, I couldn’t get used to the way things were at home, it was if my mind had turned a corner and I didn’t fit back into the space I had left behind. I had lived all my life in a small village then a small town, I stayed one more year then moved to London.The work I shot in 1985 I exhibited in 1986 at the West End Centre in Aldershot and simply titled it From Agra to Srinigar; it was a road trip and the photographs reflected that. The journey we made was done as cheaply as possible on rickety buses on hair-raising roads, in boats and by foot, I never forgot it and constantly dreamt of returning.

KK I am curious as I never saw your series of photographs From Agra to Sringinar…

AF Yes it was all shot with colour 35mm film and I had a metz flash with me too – seems odd to think I carried that on my first trip to India, I don’t think I used it that much; it was so bulky and getting it set up was a hassle. Recently I have worked with a 5×4 on the street in India but I always have someone guarding me, mainly incase I get run over! The early work was quite classic colour documentary work, capturing gestures and expressions, looking for “decisive moments”, watching tourists and looking at the relationship between the advertising on the streets and the ‘real’ life on the streets. I have been going through it again recently and some of it has inspired the photographs I am taking now.

KK You took road trip photographs? How did you perceive this predominantly white male tradition of photography? Travel photography always seems more about the observer than the observed.

AF I like exploding the male photographic myths – woman on the road – I am not sure why it didn’t really take off. I mean there were women travelers in the past (you have mentioned one of them who I must read). You don’t have to be alone to make pictures on a road trip. I have a whole series of work around Road Trips named deliberately that way. In fact I am going to do that one day: with all my travel photographs create a diary of a woman on the road as a book. Regarding the observed being the only subject of travel photography I agree that seems to be the case, various documentarists such as Susan Mieselas, Bill Burke and Sharon Lockhart have tried different approaches each one taking care to broaden the perspective of the traditional documentarist. But travel photography is in a category of its own, usually incredibly clichéd – well there is a challenge!
AF Karen, your work has predominantly been about exploring myth and fable, blurring fact and fiction with fantastical spaces– What sort of storyteller are you? How does what you have done in India relate to the history of the work you have done to date in the UK and Europe?

KK A strange sort of storyteller in that my images although narrative are not exactly stories but rather allegories alluding to the foundation myths that have created the fine art heritage of Europe which include photography in museums and academies across Europe. Connoisseurs, a series
of framed photographs, used heightened cibachrome colour, with text on brass plaques to challenge taste and the search for authenticity in British high culture, tracing the geneology of the museum from the private country house mansion (Chiswick House to the public 19th century museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum). In that work I brought in objects and people staging scenarios which commented on the underlying assumptions of taste. In fact I installed temporary objects to photograph in these museum spaces such as a taxidermised monkey, a collection of telescopes or books. So the photographs photographed installed objects or asked friends to perform actions. I was interested in culture and how it contributed to national identity. I was trying understand what British culture was. I felt like an outsider observing a strange tribe.
My early 1980’s black and white work began to distance itself from social documentary in the classical sense. I wanted to use what I had learned from conceptual art (the use of text with image) and create a new critical documentary style that used the aesthetics of fine art print photography marrying it with a deconstructive, often humorous textual strategy. It attempted to use humour and irony through staging portrait and situations , using social actors to perform for the camera. My work looked at class distinction in Britain and role of women in that class but also how power was always legitimized and underscored by the material culture and architectural space in museums, clubs or fine art academies in Europe.
As a student of photography and film at the Polytechnic of Central London in the mid 1970’s (now University of Westminster) I saw my work idealistically as a political intervention critiquing a naïve social realism or humanist photography based on the decisive moment. I was using photography as a research tool enabling me to understand British history and its social structures.Under Thatcher’s conservative policies and cuts many people were marginalised and disenfranchised. Class distinctions were very visible as they are becoming once more. Inequality in Britain has always been an issue .
Before the institutionalisation of a research culture in higher education and its instrumentalisation through a PhDs in practice based research, I was engaging with methodologies that came from conceptual art and cultural studies which were considering the Western gaze (White Eurocentric) highly problematic.
I am now using photography in a similar way in India. I have begun with what is considered part “official” national culture and its heritage like I did in 1980’s England and later in 1990’s France photographing the Louvre and The D’Orsay Museum. In India I am a participant observer, collaborator of what is an upper caste culture that is opening up and liberalizing in terms of women’s position yet there is still more change coming! India’s emerging middle class is vast and it is producing highly literate and educated young women who are forming their own businesses. My photography in India so far pays homage to the extraordinary beauty and power of Rajput and Mughal architecture and the hybrid cultures represented in stories that are written and represented in miniature paintings, sculptures found in temples, palaces, havelis and mausoleums, but also folk and tribal art.
My thoughts were: How are women and animals represented ? Whose portraits are privileged in paintings? Whilst women are represented as goddesses yet still subordinated and abused for their insufficient dowries. (I am not deluded about inequalities that exist in the West either!) How
does early photography in India represent women under the British Raj? How to represent and portray high caste culture in a period of huge change in India …These are some of my ongoing concerns…Yet how to engage in a critically informed fashion .
KK Anna, do tell me more about your photographic work and your thoughts on India. We are both professors of photography now and we both teach photography. Teaching has always been intextricably linked to my practice as a photographer, students are our teachers: we learn from them as much as they learn from us.

AF My work comes out of the documentary tradition, I love the classic tales related by roaming photographers. I am fascinated that they are told by predominantly men, the few women who have made this kind of work are role models for me and I am also intrigued by the early women travelers (always wealthy) and sometimes with camera. I am intending to research further some of these women and have been highly influenced by engaging with the history of Indian photography introduced to me via numerous photographers and friends in India.
My project in India has been to try to discover the essence of contemporary life as experienced by Indian women. It is an incredibly broad area to study and I will clearly have to make some generalizations though I will do this with great care. My work is intended for audiences both in the West and in India it will read differently in different places but this is not important; what matters is that I want to tell a story about the everyday lives of different women in different parts of India, it might be that I concentrate wholly on the middle classes but I will decide that at a later stage. Middle class women are the women I relate to and I have found it fascinating how different my life might have been had I grown up an Indian in India. Today higher education is free for women in India and many of the graduates I have met are battling between their parents desire to see them married and their own desire to progress their careers. Middle class women in India have, in some ways, more freedom than middle class Western women: in the sense that we work all day at work then come home and work in the house and for the kids yet my equivalent in India would employ a number of people to do some of the jobs I do at home and in the office. However an Indian woman, once married, may have to move in with her in-laws (something that has really surprised me for a nation that seems in tune with its inner emotions) or move to fit in with her husband (though this obviously happens in the West too). So there are interesting dilemmas, advantages and disadvantages and somehow I want to capture an idea of all this in my pictures. There is also the academic side, as a photography professor from the University for the Creative Arts working to develop the new Post Graduate Photography Diploma at the National Institute of Design with Dr Deepak John Mathews has also been inspiring; the students, so enthusiastic, have taken on a range of subjects and translated them into images and stories that no foreign traveler would be able to see or find – their works and their knowledge has informed my direction.
AF Can you tell me something about how the past and present come together in your work?

KK All my work since the Gentlemen series (1981- 1983) has used heritage and historical interiors in which to collaboratively stage portraits and scenarios to reflect on contemporary discourses of power and their legitimization through stories and “master narratives”. In Gentlemen it was patriarchy, in Capital early globalisation and capitalism, in Academies art history, fine art education and museum studies. The past always pervades the present in my photography. Of course it is a revised past, not an authentic past …that is now lost and now the struggle is around whose history. What does our version of history choose to privilege?
My recent series, named in homage to Marguerite Duras’ seminal 1975 film India Song, (a seminal French film about unrequited love in Kolkata and dying colonialism) celebrates the animals and characters out of stories in the Ramayana, Panchatanatra and Mahabharata … The animals occupy women’s rooms and men’s rooms in palaces and havelis standing in for avatars, atmans. They are the symbolic animals of India: Hanuman the langur monkey God, Ganesh the elephant, peacock s and Tigers consorts of Goddesses Shiva anad Laksmi. These rooms have become museums open to visitors but also heritage hotels run by today’s maharaja’s family. With the captions I have also tried to allude to women that have affected Indian history . The palaces rooms in Samode, Jaipur and Dungarpur are material remnants of a way of life that is now past and the memories they hold are harder to access. Miniatures, wall paintings and early photographs are now being archived and studied. Glimpses of these archives can be seen publicly when photographs of the past are hung up as in the Maharaja of Mysore’s Palace in Bangalore or encrusted into palace walls of the Juna Mahal in Dungarpur. There is also an extensive palace archive of the Arvind Singh Mewar in Udaipur which has just opened a new museum of photography in Udaipur palace.

AF Are you creating new myths? And if yes what do you want them to say? Will they speak differently to different audiences?

KK I hope that by referencing Indian myths but not illustrating them in their excessive visuality and colour remind us through the animal’s gaze that the “incredible India” promoted by tourism is also fragile. With global warming and climate change created by mass industrialization both animal and heritage are under threat. As the work celebrates and shows the beauty there is also the transience and decay of life. How many Bengal tigers roam freely? How many liontailed macaques? How many black buck? Where have the cheetahs gone? Are they all destined to be trophies in the grand palaces and homes of contemporary Maharajas?
Some of us may achieve spiritual/ financial freedom but at what cost to those millions of citizen’s pouring into Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkatta hoping for a better life? The tribals are resisting land development of their natural sacred sites …the same old story of human
“progress”…development carries with it heavy consequences . I do think context is important as all my work and that this work will resonate most in India. It is made with an Indian audience in mind. They will recognize the references and I dedicate this work to them.

AF Can you say something about using colour in India?

KK I am very self conscious of exoticism and its links to colour often disparaged by Europeans of the North who may still prefer their cool pastels, soft greens grays and objective typologies and tasteful minimalism. There is a puritanical chromophobia which sees rich visuality as linked to a consumerist culture of excess or kitsch.
Colour is very much part of Indian popular culture found in giant advertising posters and film posters. Colour in India is all pervasive; even in the desert the bright clothes of people, the drawings on the mud houses, mirrors on women’s skirts, the make up of the Katakali dancers in the south. Colour is a powerful visual tool that is absolutely right for my new work in India.

AF What process do you go through when making a body of work?

KK It is an extensive, ongoing process… reading as much as I can about the stories that relate to Indian visual culture … collecting images , researching the history of the architectural sites. Trying to grasp the complexity of the rich philosophical traditions in India that intermingle. I am reading the foundation stories of India which include The Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata and Panchatantra… these are very old stories based on an oral tradition and they get performed and visualized in dances, paintings, miniatures throughout India. Bollywood and Bhangra music is part of Indian popular culture that has a huge audience. I am studying the Indian cinema of Satyajit Ray and the Mahabharata of Peter Brooks, also Black Narcissus, the extraordinary film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger . .

AF How do you relate to the insider/outsider debate?

KK There has always been a confusion about my identity and where I fit in. In the 1980s I represented British photography internationally in arts council and British Council touring shows. I represented Britain in the Fifth Sydney Biennale in 1984. Yet now I have not had a major exhibition in Britain for over 9 years although I have retrospectives of my work across France, Spain, Belgium and Italy. My work is in museum collections in France yet very poorly represented in public collections in Britain. My work rarely gets included in British survey shows because it does not fit comfortably yet I have taught many of the photographers in these shows. I have lived for most of my life in Britain, I am a resident yet still hold an American passport. My mother tongue was German yet it is now lost and I speak English, Puerto Rican and French.
I am an outsider, I have never felt totally at home in England and even though I have been part of the British art world I operate discretely eschewing the celebrity culture endorsed by the auction houses and Charles Saatchi. I doubt I will ever become a ‘national treasure’ as I find the inequality in a still-class based Britain unacceptable. This is an important space for me to operate
in. It has become part of my identity. It may be a romantic position but it is also a critical position which entails self critique.
KK Has making work in India changed us?

AF The opportunity to exhibit work in India has been vital to me. I really wanted to engage an Indian audience in what I have done in the past before I presented a final version of the work I am making in India, to provide an identity for my work and some context for who I am. This seemed particularly important for a documentarist. I was thrilled to be invited to exhibit at Tasveer Arts and the opportunity has been very beneficial for me. I have also gained enormous knowledge from the staff and students at the various institutions that I have worked in, particularly the National Institute of Design. None of the work I have done would have been possible without the generous support of The University for the Creative Arts and The British Council. Being in India has undoubtedly changed me: the nature of the people and the country, so gentle and generous, has rubbed off on me – it has enabled me to look at the world through very different eyes.

KK Like you I feel absolutely privileged to be accepted as a fine art photographer in India. To be asked to make work in India has changed my life at time when I least expected it. It has also been thanks to time given to me to pursue travels and research by my colleagues at the University of the Creative Arts that has helped me make this work possible. I am inspired and hope to continue to develop this project into a film project in the near future. My dream is to work with the Indian film industry in an experimental way using simple methods and High Definition video to tell new stories about contemporary India .

KAREN KNORR. FAVOLE in The Contemporary Photography Museum, Milan

15.05.2010 – 12.09.2010
The Contemporary Photography Museum presents the Karen Knorr Favole exhibition: eighteen great photographic works and a video of the Fables series. An evocative and silent dialogue between nature and culture.

http://www.museofotografiacontemporanea.org/fotografia/index.html?docume…

http://www.abitare.it/events/karen-knorr-fablesstories/