Public Release of “The Sinner”

This is my first feature length documentary film and we–Justice Project Pakistan, with the guiding support of Sarah Belal, Rimmel Mohydin and others at Justice Project Pakistan, are finally releasing it.

And we are doing it first in Pakistan.

The film takes us into the world of capital punishment in Pakistan through the life of one man; Jan Masi. Jan Masi worked as an execution for nearly 30 years, and claims to have executed over 1800 people. He started his work in the enthusiastic pursuit of revenge for the execution of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

This isn’t a typical documentary film. No talking heads. No linear story-telling. No polemics or moral grand standing. No righteous exclamations against capital punishment. Instead, Jan Masi, his life, his scars, his fears and despair, act as metaphors for the meaning of capital punishment in Pakistan, and the consequences it has on the broader Pakistani society.

Published on December 5, 2017 2:30 pm.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Pakistan, Pakistan Justice Project Essays, The Daily Discussion

Sudhir Patwardhan

Sudhir Patwardhan.

Can you discover ‘an influence’ after the fact?

What do you call someone who seems to embody your eye, your sensibility, and yet you had never seen his / her work, and yet, when you now see it, you see the ‘influence’…the similarities?

Is he confronting the same questions? Is he seeing this incredibly complex and multi-layered world with the same desire to depict it as close to that complexity as possible?

I was taken aback. The aesthetic pursuit is so familiar. It is as if he is a step ahead of me. He is a step ahead of me.

I am going through these images–gorgeous, striking, unique, and no, I refuse to give you some ‘European’ reference to understand them in any way. They are Patwardhan’s and his alone. But I want to make them as photographs.

They are the photographs I would make if in Mumbai. It is beautiful stuff. It makes me want to go and make photographs.

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Published on November 18, 2017 2:36 pm.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Musings On Confusions, Photography

The Polis Project…Is Up And Running

If you can’t join them, then just do it on your own.

We launched a new collective focused on research, reportage and resistance. The specific goals and objectives are being developed as we speak, but the idea is a simple one: to collect under one banner a group of individuals from different fields – artists, writers, academics, photographers, intellectuals, poets and others, who are consistently working against the grain. In this time of collective conformity, and a media sycophancy to power and extremism, some of us felt the need to create a small space where people are still determined to refuse the agendas of political power, debilitating capitalism, nationalist extremism and neoliberal idiocy, and remain fools in their hearts, and idealists in their souls.

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Published on October 12, 2017 6:28 pm.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Schedules & Logistics, The Daily Discussion

Laughing From The Wrong Side

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It was a relief to finally read something that reminds us that comedy is not dissent. This piece by Sugarman echoes a critique I wrote some months ago – and for which I was summarily mocked, about John Oliver and his treatment of the issue of state surveillance of American citizens, and later, on his rather bizarre and right-wing interview of Snowden.

In the first piece I had argued that:

“Comedy denudes issues of urgency and the human will to act. It finds a way to make us laugh at torture, social deprivation, racism, war and murder. It makes acceptable what ought to be intolerable and seduced us into a place where we come to believe that describing and articulating something as a joke is an act. and it lets us feel that having laughed, we have somehow done and acted. for after all, we laughed st the fools and that sets us apart from them.

Comedy has become the anesthesia our capitalist societies are given so that we can accept the unacceptable. So that we can indulge in inaction while thinking we are acting. Comedy is the posture we adopt when critical thinking and critical engagement are lost.”

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Published on April 25, 2016 12:41 pm.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Musings On Confusions, The Daily Discussion

Clueless Liberalism

France political and security responses are a good case study of how popular Islamophobia spreads in a nation. If the State acts in such a targeted, and sweeping fashion, and its spokes persons define so clearly and explicitly the ‘enemy’ they are going after, the citizenry can’t really be expected to remain immune from its constructions and framing of how to evaluate and judge a situation, and whom to blame for it. So when the state so publicly demonstrates its resolve, so to speak, and the ordinary, over-worked and under-engaged citizen watches all this, it isn’t all too surprising that the pathology spreads.

“Backed by the new powers, authorities have carried out about 3,400 raids on mosques, homes, and businesses with more than 300 people placed under house arrest.”

Of course, add to this the near daily media discourse and framing of wars in various countries where the construction of the ‘enemy’ is almost always on religious or cultural grounds, with all political and historical facts and legacies distorted and modified to create further evidence of ‘the enemies’ deviant and inhuman thought process and strategies.

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Published on April 25, 2016 12:33 pm.
Filed under: American And Her Wars, Background Materials, Journalism, Just Fun Stuff, Musings On Confusions, The Daily Discussion

Our Mothers

when I turn on the tv, I want to see muslims who look like:

our mothers
draped in saris / shalwar kameez
speaking in punjabi / urdu / bengali / pashto / gujrati / hindi
with a briskness that is sweet and firm all at once.

our mothers
wearing the latest bold&bright fabric wrapped around their hips
speaking in hausa / swahili / arabic
blending melodies of cultures and heritages
that were supposed to be wiped away.

 

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Published on December 15, 2015 9:18 pm.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff

Minding The Perceptible Gap

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I did find this discomforting…its only the trailer, but the associations and presumptions are a offensive combination of Orientalism / Historical revisionism. Indeed, as someone pointed out, they are fantastic musicians, but this fact is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand i.e the appropriation of Western symbols of liberation and freedom, juxtaposed against highly curtailed and crafted ideas of ‘religious’ fundamentalism and barbarism. We have seen this very often, and as well made as this film is, and as well crafted the narrative, it really doesn’t seem to want to get past this dichotomy, and to find a way to convince the international movie-going circuit that there is a longing to be more like them, and a desire to speak more like they do. And in that process, all sorts of liberties have been taken to construct the freedom vs. barbarism narrative.  Details »

Published on October 27, 2015 11:52 am.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Musings On Confusions

Prisoners Caught In The Searchlight!

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There is a uncomfortable relationship between winning awards and doing journalism. Or photojournalism. Personally, I find it odd that reporters and photographers are so keen to ‘pick up’ awards, to walk down red-carpets, to accept trinkets that are apparently there to mark their ‘achievements’. It begs the question: what is the journalist’s or photojournalist’s achievement? How does one measure that in fact? Well, clearly in photojournalism, the achievement is always merely aesthetic. The works are never measured for their political, social, cultural or intellectual impact. Never. We are merely happy to pick up awards because the pictures were nice. Its all quite insular, self-congratulatory, and in complete contradiction of the public rhetoric of the craft, and the moral grandstanding that so many writers and photographers spew in social media and interviews. Details »

Published on October 27, 2015 11:24 am.
Filed under: Journalism, Just Fun Stuff, Musings On Confusions

The Amsterdam NOOR / NIKON Masterclass

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I am in Pakistan now. But in a few weeks I will be in The Netherlands. And here is why.

We hear from self-proclaimed photojournalism futurists that the media world as we know it is dead. We are told repeatedly by major magazine editors that there are no budgets for serious, long-term photojournalism assignments. We argue every week with other editors for a even the most basic of day rates for the assignments we do get. We hear and read about all the new technical breakthroughs that are making sure magazine-spread, linearly laid out photo-essays, once the bread and butter of the craft, are no longer relevant, and that more sophisticated tools are promising us non-linear, complex, multi-layered means of story-telling.

And yet, there are few photography workshops that will actually discuss and incorporate these realities and help students figure out ways to navigate them. Even the most well known, resourced and taught photojournalism workshops continue to teach students based on a pedagogy that has little relevance in the world the students hope to make a name for themselves. We continue to see people standing around a light table carefully and with exaggerated precision, laying out photos in an A-to-B sequence, as if the magazine page was the principal and only possible publishing medium. We continue to hear teachers talking about ‘sense of place image’ or ‘an opener’ or a ‘closer’ and other such anachronistic ideas that frankly suggest that there  has been no digital transformation. Linearity, sequencing, start-here-then-go-there approach remain the principle method in workshops, photo festivals, gallery exhibits and even online portfolio presentations. This despite the fact that more likely than not, a new photographers work will end up on a digital platform far before it ever ends up in a printed one.

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Published on September 23, 2015 7:53 am.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Photography, Photography Workshop

Nothing Left To Do But The Selling Or Pakistan’s Tryst With The Public Relations Campaign

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It is important and necessary to critique foreign coverage of Pakistan. But this video isn’t it.

There is a conviction amongst a certain class of Pakistanis that what Pakistan suffers from is an image problem. this is very much like a certain class of Israeli who feels the same. they are convinced that it is portrayals that are the problem, not the problems that are portrayed. for this class, what is demanded is simply a different portrayal. a desire frequently backed by the sponsoring – quite often through international corporate and development funds, cultural events of limited and specific scope and access. If we can only show the world ‘we’ – this class that seems to be most concerned about ‘portrayals’, are sophisticated, well read and urbane, perhaps we will not be so ashamed of the issues we know are real, but have no inclination, courage or imagination to face them and speak about them. 

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Published on August 18, 2015 6:49 pm.
Filed under: Just Fun Stuff, Pakistan, The Daily Discussion