I have been to India, but only once, more than a decade ago, and only for a few days. And while it would be true to say I left India after a too-short visit, it would also be true to say India has never left me. I did not think of myself as a photographer then, but there was no way not to revel in the colors and textures and sounds. Even the monochromatic deserts were vibrant.
“Indian Rites: Signs of Devotion” by Paul Wakefield
Published by Banaras Cultural Foundation, 2023
Review by W. Scott Olsen
We traveled the tourist “Golden” triangle—Dehli to Agra to Jaipur—in May. The heat was humbling. We saw the sites a tourist is supposed to see—the Taj Mahal at daybreak, Jantar Mantar, and painted elephants at the Amber Fort—and for that, I am grateful. But the real impact came from just looking, from conversations with people I did not know, from deep-core wonder and wondering, from being so far outside my expectations that every moment was, frankly, a moment of openness and hope.
So you can imagine the anticipation I felt when I opened Paul Wakefield’s book Indian Rites: Signs of Devotion. While there is a lot of photographic work about India that treads old ground, bordering on cliché, and there is a lot of work that focuses on one issue or another, I was hoping for a book that spoke to the atmosphere, the presence of the ethereal, the way India provokes thought.
When I opened Wakefield’s book, I was transported and absorbed.
In an opening essay, Sarah Wheeler writes,
Gandhi insisted that true civilization concerns itself with moral self-knowledge and spiritual strength. It is easy to believe, when you leaf through Paul Wakefield’s pages. The images in Signs of Devotion conjure a desire to reach for the transcendental—the characteristic that distinguishes us from cobras and heifers (or so we like to think. Who knows, really?) That limpid Indian light turns out to be the perfect vehicle for thoughts of the spiritual variety, and thoughts travel freely on monsoon breezes.
Later, she writes,
I’m not sure how Wakefield achieves this impression of timelessness. All first-class art looks artless. But note the classical composition of the cover image; and imagine how Long Wakefield waited before the tusker opened his mouth—you can almost hear the plangent grief, like a ship’s horn.
In another introduction, Shrivatsa Goswami writes,
The canvas of Indian culture is filled with the richness of many colours. Primarily these colours and their different shades emanate from the variations with human nature and attitudes. The objective being, along with the awareness and act of goodness, to propel us towards seeking the state of unbound bliss. Human experience however, always falls short of this goal. It is a human predicament to be limited both in time and space. Albeit, this encounter with the limitless, I’m sorry, what the limited launches us toward the search for the unlimited…
Miracles do happen. It’s all in our act of seeing. If we separate our world from the divine, then the two shall never meet. Logic and science agree on that. But there is another way of bridging that gap; the artistic way. The way of artistic experiences and expressions, through music, dance, poetry, drama, scripture, painting and all the different forms of visual and performing arts, have that miraculous power of “seeing” the infinite in the finite. The Infinite is always in front of us…
Paul Wakefield has properly walked upon this path of seeing. He has seen the vast field of Indian rites as they are. His eye behind the camera has received, rather than imposed itself on the seen.
Paul Wakefield’s book, Indian Rites: Signs of Devotion is an extraordinary achievement. While the images could be considered a kind of candid street photography, they are, as well, deeply rooted in aesthetics, an oftentimes classical sense of composition, as well as compositions that are as often as much about color as about the other elements within a frame.
I could say the images are evocative, but what I really mean is that they are simultaneously insightful, reverent and respectful. In that reverence there is the sense of wonder I remember and recognize.
Wakefield has an eye for those moments of illumination which articulate beauty in the unusual (at least to the Western eye), and a gateway into a deeper consideration that is, in the end, deeply rewarding. While there is no doubt that, given the plethora of images of India, the cliches have established themselves, there wasn’t a single page throughout this book where I did not feel I was in the presence of something artistically original.
Although there is an index in the back of the book that gives the date and location, and sometimes a little bit of context for each image, in the book itself, the images are presented without context or explanation. This is an invitation to linger and wonder: What am I looking at? Of course, the answer is we’re looking at all sorts of things all at once—the people, the situation, the setting, the color. There are portraits in this book. There are landscapes. There are festivals. Oftentimes, we’re looking at our own ignorance, which is followed by curiosity.
The title is two-edged. What is going on inside the image, the narrative action of the people could be interpreted as a rite, a sign of devotion. Yet it is equally true to say that the images are Wakefield’s signs, his own acts of devotion. Wakefield’s images reveal a particular vision of India from the point of view of someone who loves the participation he enjoys.
Some of the images in this book will stay with me for a very long time. A picture of people praying in a river (the back of the book tells me this is Maha Kumbh Mela, Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, 2001) is simply eloquent. An image of orange-robed figures walking down the street (with the same notation in the back) has a formalist sense to it while compelling a viewer to join the story. An image of what appears to be a very long swath of blue fabric, a study in bold and dynamic color, sweeps me away.
Love, Admiration, Affection, Attentiveness, Care—these as synonyms to the world Devotion.
As photographers, we need to understand our stance towards our subject. We can interrogate, celebrate, and question. Our relationship to what we frame with a lens can mean everything.
Signs of Devotion, as an idea, become even more complicated if we move into philosophy (think phenomenology and psychoanalytic literary theory) and interpret “sign” as the duality of signifier and signified. This is the richness that India provides, and Wakefield reveals. There is always a layer to unpack.
Devotion, the term, when used just a bit beyond the casual understanding, is deep core, spiritual, and self-defining. As a photographer, I am deeply impressed. As a traveler and a human being, I am grateful for the way this book widens my imagination of what is possible.
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Rik Katz
November 16, 2024 at 22:31
Wonder when this might be available overseas ? Looks great