ICS Seminar Series - Christiane Kühling
Date: Thursday 19 November 2015
Time: 11.30am - 1pm
Venue: EB.3.17, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus
Christiane Kühling
Photography in India
Abstract
This paper explores the use of photography among groups of young Indian males as 'timepass' during their visits to Goa, India. Timepass is a term used by informants to describe passing time together and the way they integrate photography in timepass. Timepass-photography makes the act of photographing a skillful play of poses and cameras. At stake is the aspect of sociality and liberation through this photographic play. Inspired by popular movies and music videos, posing in front of the camera entails a performance of filmic comedies, action and dramas. In this context, cameras are toys to stage and re-enact the visible, rather than a machine to capture the visual. Photo-sessions on Goa's beaches, forts and scenic sites known to visitors from popular movies serve to confirm friendship affiliation and to fabricate Goa as 'fun', 'free life' and 'being ourselves'. Timepass-photography, it is argued, frames a sense of sociability and liberality by allowing visual oscillations between expressing and imitating self and others, between contemporaneity and timelessness, between space as 'site' and as social place. In this way, investigating the play of young people with visibilities, places and bodies offers a lens to explore ontologies of photography and links between photography and tourism.
Biography
Christiane Kühling M.A. is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her research investigates relations between photography and tourism with a particular focus on young people in India. Decentering tourist photography as indexical, the research looks at diverse ways young Indian tourists embody, perform and practice 'photography' during holidays. Her interests broadly include the anthropology of photography and media, the body and the senses and South Asia Studies.