Ravi Agarwal critically considers the roles of the artist and the activist in this tete-a-tete with Meera Menezes.

MEERA MENEZES: FROM BEING A concerned activist to being a concerned photographer - how have the vocations flown into each other?

Ravi Agarwal. Mechanical Man II. Photograph.
From An Other Place. 2008-2009.

Ravi Agarwal: I became part of a movement to save the Delhi ridge forest in 1994. I was a simple engineering consultant putting communication systems together for people. I realized, however, that I wanted to do value-based work - the Toxics work therefore got off the ground. I had my first solo that year; it was called Street View (1994). One thing led to another. Jan Bremen saw the show and invited me to do a book, which was called Down and Out. Published by OUP in 2000, it was about migrant labour in Gujarat. I was soon part of the Lalit Kala Akademi show on photography in 1995, and in 2002, I was invited to be at Documenta 11. After Documenta, I did not shoot for a while.

M. M.: Why was that?

R. A.: There were several reasons, some of them personal. I started questioning many assumptions about photography.

M. M.: Like?

R. A.: Though photography is very expansive, it can also be very limiting, I suppose, like any other medium. This idea of just documenting and looking at visuals as a way of presenting/representing something made me a little uncomfortable. Of course, when I took pictures and someone asked me how I took them, I could not explain the process. At one level, it was a very intuitive thing to do. I started questioning the act and its assumptions. I did some work with a community in Delhi in the Bhatti mines for six to eight months then - they were going to be displaced and I documented them (2003).

Strangely, the art world was quite hostile to me then. I had a life outside of it. I was not doing video or installations; I was doing 'pure' photography. Why, I wasn't even using text! In Alien Waters (2006), I began looking at the river - the issues of pollution and regeneration. Here again, I did not look at the project as 'work'. I remember ending this journey with what was later termed as a self-performatory work, called, The Shroud.

M. M.: Representation is a big issue, isn't it, especially, its politics?

R. A.: Yes. When I shot Down and Out, for example, I was shooting very marginal people - unorganized, migrant labourers who not only form the bottom of the Indian social and economic strata but also form its bulk. Their lives have a quiet but very powerful dignity, which is denied. Working with them was life-changing in different ways. For example, I was shooting these mill workers who had lost their jobs when the Ahmedabad textile mills were shut down. The camera I held in my hand had been produced due to the many scientific and technological developments that had occurred in the last 35 years. These men had worked for the same 35 years as well and had retired with no pension and benefits. Questions like "What am I exactly doing?", "How do I integrate my understanding of contradictory worlds?" rang out very loud in my mind.

M. M.: The fight between nature and culture seems to be high on your agenda.

R. A.: Well, yes. Alien Waters, for example, drew from young Karl Marx's writings. He wrote about how when you dirty the water, the fish cannot live in it any more as the fish get alienated from themselves and from their environment. I intuitively felt that a lot of what we saw had to do not only with industrialization but also with the idea of capital, especially its way of changing people's lives. The interface of capital and labour has serious implications for our ideas and actions. I do not subscribe to Marxism as a successful political system but I do think Marx's early writings are very incisive. The act of immersion that I have explored in many of my works is also part of Hindu ritual. The separation of man and nature is, to me, about the assertion of power as well.