Pinney

In Pinney's Introduction "How the Other Half..." points out the study of the medium that has been put out is in recounted, but only incorporating the Western (European and later American) history within the medium. This was really interesting to me because, as a photographer myself who has studied the history of the medium, I had never thought of it that way and it is true. I had only learned about the great European photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, and Robert Frank and then the great American photographers like Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans, and Robert Adams. He points out that photography should not and in fact is not something that is only practiced in the West and of cultural importance/significance. He states that Indian photographers began to pop up shortly after its invention (around the same time that European and American photographers began to pop up as well), so this breaks down this preconceived notion or assumption that because they weren't part of the West, they didn't have access to the technology that countries in the West had and that they were a people not as advanced ("civilized") as the West. I know that before I was an Anthropology major, I had this romanticized, and slightly backward view on indigenous cultures and I thought that they weren't as cultured as other cultures A.K.A. mine, something that was very ethnocentric of me to think. This just reinforces that this is wrong.

Because Pinney points this out, I realized that history that we learn in school is also a history that is very specific and stylized. The way it is written and taught is from a certain perspective and only includes a certain perspective. Here, with writing an other history of photography, we see that there isn't one way that we are to use photography or a correct way to take a picture. Each culture uses it in different ways, produces different pictures, has different styles, and also different notions of photography, the photograph, and its capabilities and incapabilities. This is evident when looking at the practice of photography and the views on it in India and comparing it to those of the West. They are different, but both are valid and to only include the Western notion or to judge photography in India using Western notions is ethnocentric.

He writes that "photography was seen to surpass and eradicate the subjectivity and unreliability of earlier technologies of representation [so] indexicality was thus mobilized as a guarantee of fixity." He is stating that when it was first created, photography was not seen as an art form or used to express creativity and instead used more scientifically to record things. This meant that it could replace painting and drawings subjectivity with objectivity. However, he points out that when looking at the colonial archive, he sees that photography actually is quite subjective. He sees an "inevitable randomness within the image" of a photography and instead sees that a painting or a drawing is "capable of excluding randomness because they only reflect the imagination and skill of their creators, and when those qualities are present in excess they are capable of driving out the incidental." Here he is stating that a painting or drawing because it is created and selected by the creator that leaves out the random, "like a filter capable of complete exclusion." Conversely, "something extraneous will always enter" into the camera. The photographer and be very cautious and stringent on what is and is not in front of the camera when setting up, however, "the inability of the lens to discriminate will ensure a substrate or margin of excess," where things will randomly find themselves in the frame. This randomness allows the photograph to be more open for interpretation.

I am not quite convinced with this argument however, because I think that a photograph, like a painting or drawing, is just as selective and filtered and this "randomness" can occur in all three. The photographer does have control on what comes out. The way that the person aims the camera is equivalent to where a painter decides to paint and the way the painter decides to place his brush on the canvas is equivalent to how the photographer decided to print the photograph (cropping, photoshopping etc). They are both selective and sometimes when you are painting, just like in photography, surprises or things that were unexpected happen. You often intend to make a painting one way and it comes out totally different, just like I initially took a picture of a cat on the street and then when printing or reviewing the film, I see a man in the background wearing a "I love cats" T-shirt. It's an interesting thought that he proposes, but I think a little off. But then again, I have studied with Western notions and may be predisposed to this notion of photography???