Evolution of photography, in pictures

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Evolution of photography, in pictures | A visual history

The Photography Centre is a comparatively recent addition to the Victoria & Albert Museum. The seven galleries housing the V&A’s photo collection make up the largest exhibition space dedicated to a permanent photo collection in the UK. As you walk into the first gallery, you are drawn into the history of the medium, with several images from the earliest decades of photography. Gradually, the exhibits pull you from the 19th century into the 20th and then into current times. As you explore this, you realise you are traversing not only the history of the medium but also the history of the world as recorded by the medium: here is the photograph as an early object, here it is in colonial albums, here is a record of protests, of revolutions and war, here it is as the controlling documentation of colonial regimes, or in the game-changing picture magazines that proliferated in America from the 1930s to the 1970s, here it is as an art object or a tool of protest.

Unsurprisingly, there is a preponderance in the collection of Western, and, among them, of male, white, Anglo-American photographers, but that changes the closer you come to our own times. Two of the contemporary photographers have roots in South Asia. Vasantha Yogananthan was born in France but has travelled extensively through India and Sri Lanka to produce one of the most brilliant series of photographs to come out of the subcontinent. A Myth of Two Souls finds or constructs images that take off from the Ramayana, where Yogananthan frames today’s people and landscapes but with Mareecha or Luv and Kush in mind. The pictures are a small but powerful antidote to the grotesque misuses to which people in power have been putting our epics and myths.

Two nearby walls display a very different documentation of contemporary India and of people’s resistance to the misuse of power. Gauri Gill, one of India’s major photographers, kept visiting the farmers’ protests around Delhi’s borders. In the 48 images from her 2020 series The Village on the Highway, you see a human figure in only one frame—a man lying down in a truck, supporting his head on his hand, à la the statues of the Buddha, his figure screened by some netting. All the other photographs are of the structures put up by the farmers. Here, trucks have been turned into houses and langars, coolers and air-conditioners have been attached to the backs of trailers to survive the summer heat; a tractor rests under a shamiana, almost like another member of the family. At one level, you can connect these images to classic work from photography’s past: Eugène Atget’s unpeopled documentation of Paris streets comes to mind, as does the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher hanging in the adjacent gallery. At another level, Gill’s work has always been about human warmth and connection, and you can see the presence of the farmers in these pictures, their caring of the elders who refused to be left out of the protests, the inventiveness of Indian jugaad.

Placed almost at the end of the image-journey through the galleries, it is a beautifully fitting penultimate stop, as it were, to the current display.

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