Asking Questions: Portrait of the Past Aghori
© Jan Skwara
Asking Questions
After reviewing the exhibition “Portrait of the Past Aghori “ and the information text that accompanied it, I found myself asking who was the exhibition for. Who was the audience? Exhibitions designed for the general public, for collectors, in this case visual anthropologist, other visual artist or all of the above. For us to understand the structure and organization of the exhibition we need to understand who the perceived audience was. For example, an exhibition designed for collectors would look and feel different from one designed for the general gallery audience.
Putting that question aside, the exhibition is contextualized within an historical framework founded on a late 20th century technical process (the collodion image), the growth of a western middle class which housed a growing interest in the world outside their region — a growing tourism, and an academic anthropological and economic interest. It was at this time (19th century) that we witnessed the harvesting of artefacts for national museums and personal collections. As referred to in the text, photographers would head out into world to capture images to sell to a growing consumer. Photographers like Edward Curtis, an American photographer, would photograph native americans to feed a growing interest in exotic distant people and land. In Curtis’s images, like many photographers of the day, we find props brought that would be included to meet the exceptions and interest of a buying audience. For example, we find objects that were particular to a tribe located in one local appearing in photographs of a tribe a distant part of the country. We see a headdress used out of proper context; a war chief’s headdress worn by a person in a distant tribe where eagle feathers were never seen. It was not till decades later that the authenticity of the images were questioned. These images around their way into stereo views, schools, text books and travel posters. It could be said that it was the beginning of “fake news” and constructed propaganda for colonial expansionism. The images of “natives” living exotic lives, performing strange and different rituals, and wearing unusual costumes creates the “other”. Incorporating the idea of costumes, in the form of dress, into any discussion does create the other just by calling them costumes. In very basic ways we all wear costumes.
It could be said that photographs of people, in a different historical times and culture environments, that look and act differently, allows the viewer’s gaze to create the “other”. By creating the “other” the more powerful can justify the treatment of the less powerful “other”. Images of the other, created to prove the other as inferior, not-christian, created a foundation of domination: slavery.
The photographs in this exhibition, in a consistent manner, create the other. The viewer is invited to gaze creating a position of dominance over the objects in the image. Any photograph of a person, unless deeply documented, creates an “object” out of the “subject”. By “object” I refer to the loss of history, of a living life, a person without a history or future is an object.
Jan Skwara’s intriguing photographs, positions the inquisitive viewer as a researcher and possible voyeur into an unfamiliar world. His technic, using the collodion process, transports his viewer back in time. He creates, very well, the illusion of the past while working in the now. He requires his viewers to enter the portal of time, seeing the participants, the subject/object of the image, as living.
His work is encyclopedic, selecting and documenting the world he is experiencing. He is transporting the interested viewer, the reader of his images, into a world living in the past and the now.
The photographs speak for themselves the viewer needs no guide. In the end a few questions need to asked of the work and the photographer. What we see are the decisions, the selections, out of a range of photographic and documenting possibilities. We, the viewers, have to read the images and trust the photographer for accuracy. With most work presented in this genre we have to consider how much of it is a result of intervention by the photographer or a collaboration with the person and the photographer? This is a shift away from a structuralist to post-structuralist perspective, away from the notion of objectivity to subjectivity. A position where the photographer is not just a neutral recorder but an active actor in the results.
As we gaze upon Jan Skwara’s images, there is a sense of beauty with the collodion process and the content within the frame’s border. As we look at the work in total, questions need to asked of the photographer and the viewer, for both create the meaning and experience of the work.
© Robert Muffoletto 2025