There are Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s portraits of a village in India’s coastal state of Maharashtra. Over Gill’s black-and-white photographic prints of quiet countryside, tribal artist Vangad has daubed a layer of intricate glyphs.
In one scene, a river’s fish are poisoned by the leakage of toxic waste – invisible to Gill’s camera, but pictured dripping into the water by Vangad. In another, a man walks through a forest glade, gathering herbs for medicine, and is enveloped by the painter in a cosmic web of stars and birds. It suggests an immense world, resonating beyond the confines of rural life.
And it’s Sarkissian who reminds you how fickle a photograph really is. His portraits of emptied rooms, from Lebanon to Brazil, look banal, hardly worth a second look, until you learn their sad secret. These living rooms and hallways, a Hello Kitty blanket and even a messy upright piano, are the places in which a missing person – disappeared in war or because of political dissent – was last seen.
Many people are troubled by how easily images of suffering are reproduced. Whether in a charity advert, or a newspaper, are we not in danger of reducing human pain to undignified spectacle?
Sarkissian’s pictures achieve something remarkable. You cannot gawp at them, or ignore them. He has spoken of using silence “as a tool to bring the viewer closer to the image”. They are haunted, and they still haunt me.
Art is not a competition. But if I had to throw my lot in with any of these, it would be the Austrian provocateur: her barbed assaults on voyeuristic men are spiked with wit.
One time, Export reportedly paraded through a pornographic cinema in crotchless trousers: a proud two fingers up at the male gaze, she thought. Later, she struck a macho pose, spreading her legs insouciantly, while clutching a rifle: in the gallery, she’s glowering for the camera, her hair a mad mess. It’s defiant, and rather crass – and that’s why I love it.
From Friday Feb 23-Jun 2; thephotographersgallery.org.uk
