Don’t Look Back

You could say that this piece is about the present, and about the city as experienced by the photographer today. You could argue that one need not always resort to historical realities, or trace the threads of memory when the focus is in the here and now. But, the past is not dead. It’s not even past.  If I can quote a son of the South.

This is how you white-wash (so to say!) America’s cruel, brutal, racist history – write an entire piece about a Southern town, one that still celebrates its ‘civil war’ history, one that was once the center of Georgia’s cotton trade a.k.a. slave plantations and at the heart of America’s cotton trade – so powerfully, and painfully described in Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, and never once mention any of this definitive and critical history.  Details »

Published on March 12, 2017 10:29 am.
Filed under: American And Her Wars, Journalism, Photography

Iqbal Bano – Mother of Death Row Prisoner Khizar Hayat

I have no money. I can’t even afford to pay for a rickshaw to go see him. So I collect money from relatives and friends and go see him every two weeks.

Every time I go I do not know what state I will find him in. He is no longer aware or present. When I visit him he speaks about strange things – at times he hits his head against the wall, and says that the walls are mocking him. Sometimes he appears in torn clothes, other times with no clothes at all. I often have to force him to eat, for otherwise he will not eat anything. I don’t think he even knows that I am his mother. He often denies that I am his mother, sometimes abusing me in front of everyone, saying that I am some mad woman who has come to visit him. His condition now is an extreme form of what I could see happening to him when he was under the influence of a mystic at a local shrine. Everything about him changed during those years – his habits, his appearance, his language. He drifted away from his home and from his own family – he stopped coming home, stopped speaking to his wife and children. He became an addict, spent most of his time asleep on pavements outside the shrine, or wandering the streets of the city.

Details »

Published on March 11, 2017 8:47 am.
Filed under: Pakistan Justice Project Essays

Short Documentary Film – #1 – Death Row Prisoner Khizar Hayat

The first of four short documentary films I shot last Fall are finally being released for public viewing. You can read more about Khizar Kayat and his case here. Produced in collaboration with the researchers at Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), and the editors and designers at New Media Advocacy Project (N-MAP) in New York, these films highlight the miscarriages of justice that continue to plague the Pakistani capital punishment processes. I am also working on a longer feature documentary on the same subject, which I hope to complete in the next couple of months.

These short documentary films add to my ongoing project Law & Disorder: A People’s History of the Law In Pakistan. I am working on two new essays, both of which are ready as drafts but need some serious editing. The first discusses the history of capital punishment in Pakistan, and its connections to the introduction and experimentation with capital punishment during the British colonial administration in India. Pakistan’s penal code still retains many of the core tenets of the (British) India Penal Code first introduced in the mid-19th century. The second essay looks at the ways in which the pre-colonial Sharia systems of jurisprudence were re-interpreted and modified to serve the interests of the modern colonial and post-colonial nation-state.

As always, each essay has me working with material far beyond my current knowledge, requiring extensive research and what can only be described as many re-readings of texts. But, I plow ahead and so does this vast project.  

The other three videos will be released in the coming days. 

Published on March 10, 2017 7:05 pm.
Filed under: Pakistan Justice Project Essays

And, What Is Your Favourite Colour Of Photographer?

This came across my email, forwarded to me by the Magnum Foundation.

I have serious misgivings about this initiative.

There are a number of reasons, not the least of which is how the title – “Photographers of Colour” – works off the assumption of “White” universality as the norm, while others require to be defined in a ‘special category’. Whereas I can understand the instinct that gave birth to it, I am confused as to why this instinct was even considered valid and one worthy of an initiative of its own. I am surprised that more people did not raise an objection to the rather overt objectification of photographers of non-White origin this initiative demands. This entire effort requires people to self-identify themselves along ethnic and racial lines and is based on the belief that somehow ethnic and racial belonging gives them ‘credibility’ to cover stories and issues in regions of similar ethnic and racial spaces and geographies. This is a terrifying ghettoization of our craft, and in fact, reflected well in the example given in the introductory text alone where an editor’s need for African photographers to cover an AFROPUNK event – black people sent to cover black people – seems to have provoked the idea. Why would being African be enough of a qualification to cover this event?

(Note how the questionnaire does not even ask, until the very last question, the photographer’s race. And then to, as by US law, o a voluntary basis. So what’s the point in the first place? A generic questionnaire such as the one offered demands self-identification along ethnic and racial lines. That is, it demands that a human being reduce her/himself to merely her official race category. This is simply ridiculous to even demand, or to follow!)

But here is the most egregious problem with this effort: it absolutely ignores and/or veils the fact that it editor offices that are predominantly occupied by White / Caucasian people, and that it is here ethnic and intellectually diversity is most needed. To get and find a diverse set of photographers, you need to find a diverse set (by experience, by class, by intellect) set of editors!

Details »

Published on March 2, 2017 10:46 pm.
Filed under: Photography, The Daily Discussion

Reading White Feminism: A Most Masculine State by Madawi al-Rasheed

Selections from recent readings against Western feminism – in particular, its racist and Orientalist origins and its continuing centrality in Western liberal imperial practices and discourse.

A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia

Published on March 2, 2017 9:52 am.
Filed under: Uncategorized