Tiatriste and Jungian Archetypes
Origins of Archetypes
The word archetype appeared in European texts as early as 1545, It derives from the Latin noun archetypum and that from the Greek noun (archetypon), meaning "first-moulded". An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype after which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. In psychology, an archetype is a model of a person, personality, or behavior. A stereotype on the other hand is a personality type observed multiple times, especially an oversimplification of such a type
The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back as far as Plato. ‘The Theory of Forms’ typically refers to Plato's belief that the material world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only a shadow of the real world. The forms, according to Plato, are roughly speaking archetypes or abstract representations of the many types and properties of things we see all around us.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung *compared archetypes to Platonic ideas. Archetypes, according to Jung were…innate universal psychic dispositions that form the ‘substrate’ from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings. Archetypes are components of the collective unconscious and serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behavior.
Jung also realized the reality of psyche and thought the mythic archetype contained in the psyche had autonomy, an agency beyond the individual. He proposed that the archetype had a dual nature; it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. Jung introduced the notion of a race mind, racial consciousness archetypes.
Archetypal psychology was developed by James Hillman in the second half of the 20th century attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths—gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals—that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives, that the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies.
Experiencing the Archetype (The Psychologist perspective)
The Value of the Archetype
Archetypes can be found in nearly all forms of literature, with their motifs being predominantly rooted in folklore. All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true not only of religious ideas; even the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality.
‘Tiatriste’ as the Archetypal image. Click here to view slide show
As a second generation Goan born in Dhobitalo, Mumbai, I had spent all of my adult life being disassociated from mainstream Goan culture. I spoke Konkani only with my Grandmother and English was the primary language of conversation at home and elsewhere. The cosmopolitan life in Mumbai exposed me to various influences and I was never really a ‘Tiatre’ fan, but living in ‘Dhobitalo’ one would often bump into famous ‘Tiatriste’, most of them lived in close proximity to Sonapur Church and were a common sight after Sunday mass. ‘Dhobitalao’, was described by many as the “Goan enclave of Mumbai”.
The ‘Tiatriste’ portraits confirm to the Jungian perspective of archetypal images for various reasons. Susan Sontag talks about a three way relationship between the photographer, the object of the photograph and the viewer of the same. Me being a photographer of Goan origin, the “object”/ ‘Tiatriste’ in their exaggerated stage garbs, and the viewer’s involvement (particularly the Goan race mind) that create this ‘identifiable fantasy’.
Though it sounds like a big, fancy word, an "archetype" is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
Somewhere in the Goan psyche we have Archetypal figures of who we were as a race, a culture and this is from where we draw from to express our fantasy. We even recognize fictional characters as entities for whom we might predict behavior and sympathize. (What makes the character of Ganesh recognizable to worshipers as a god, for instance?)Ironically, archetypes are not learned. They are inborn tendencies to experience the world. This imagery I believe comes from a Universal experience. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the Bhatkar, the Sasumai, the fisherwoman etc are not archetypes, but archetypal images which have crystallised out of the archetypes. The images are objective, but universal.
Ranjit Hoskote, poet, cultural theorist, curator, and my friend writes “Unlike the caricatures that the popular Hindi cinema employs to represent regional cultures – such figures are stereotypes, not archetypes – the ‘Tiatristes’ play out readily identifiable personae in whom the audience has strong emotional investments, at a personal as well as a collective level. Through their interpretations, they can exteriorise and provide a safety valve for the potentially disruptive energies of resentment and mutiny that every hierarchically ordered society would nourish; they also allow for the genial confrontation of problems that afflict the body collective, and for the anticipation and recognition of crisis in the public sphere”. (See Ranjit Hoskote’s essay http://www.alexfernandesportraits.com/hoskote.html also Alex Fernandes in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote)
Strangely enough the great Goan cartoonist, Mario de Miranda in his drawings had almost identical archetypal images of Goans to my ‘Tiatrise’ portraits. Though I had been influenced by Mario’s work right from my early years, (I was particularly fond of his Goan caricatures) I had not intended to emulate Mario’s figures in any way.
Prior to photographing the ‘Tiatriste’, I had instructed the actors to dress in the stage garbs of the characters that they best portrayed on stage. As I was shooting the portraits, I realized that I was getting images that looked very similar to Mario’s Goan characters, right down to the almost identical costumes worn by Mario’s characters and the ‘Tiatriste’. Somehow even with an exaggerated stage costume, the ‘Tiatriste’ was transformed into easily identifiable archetypal image before the camera.
I do not look on my portraits as just an illustration of ‘Tiatriste’ or ‘Tiatre’ but I always felt it has much broader implications. In a lecture entitled ‘Portraits of our people' at the Xavier’s History Research Centre in Porvorim, Goa, I had tried to explain the impact from the Archetype on my portraits. A view that both Ranjit Hoskote and myself share, but unfortunately one that somehow seems to be obscured.
The Goan portraits as a series have a temporal dimension and semiotic context. They are visual symbols that tell a story of a people in a certain time. The archetypes form a dynamic substratum common to the Goan “race mind”. The various parts that represent the whole entity for example, like their stage names, body shapes, postures, clothing etc that represents the content, the collection of ideas and perceptions that we circle in a metaphysical Venn diagram to delineate exactly what constitutes a particular entity. The collective ideas that lie within within the circle as in the hand that pushes the pen to draw it (in Mario's case) or that presses the shutter release (in my case) – or rather in the mind that guides that hand.
The archetypes had synchronastically manifested themselves in Mario’s work, in ‘Tiatre’ and my portraits. Synchronicities are those moments of "meaningful coincidence" when the boundary dissolves between the inner and the outer. Synchronicities occur when we step out of the personal dimension of our experience and access what is called the archetypal dimension of experience. An archetype synchronistically revealing itself in the outside world is a reflection that this same condition is in the process of being inwardly realized.
Thus, while archetypes themselves may be conceived as a relative few innate nebulous forms, from these may arise innumerable images, symbols and patterns of behavior. While the emerging images and forms are apprehended consciously, the archetypes which inform them are elementary structures which are unconscious and more difficult to apprehend. Being unconscious, the existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by examining behavior, images, art, myths, etc. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior on interaction with the outside world.
Alex A. A. Fernandes.
see related article by Cecil Pinto : http://alexfernandesphotography.blogspot.com/2011/01/stereotyping-goan-they-never-get-it.html
* Myth imparts structure to space and time; myth weaves the world into being. According to the perspective of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the structure of myth is buried deep in hidden process of the psyche, and this structure recurs universally in individuals and across all human societies. From his own dreams, cross-cultural studies, and the material provided by his patients, Jung developed the theory of “collective consciousness”, a repository of myth, symbol and archetypes that emanates from a source beyond the individual mind. Jung describes the archetypes of the collective unconscious as “spontaneous phenomenon which are not subject to our will, and we are therefore justified in ascribing to them a certain autonomy”. A mythological or archetypal complex- such as Judeo – Christian Apocalypse – is, from this Jungian perspective, ultimately a psychic event that can take material manifestation, like a collective dream coming to life. - From Daniel Pinchbeck's 'The Return of Quetzalcoatl'
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*Experiencing the Archetype (The psychologist perspective)
The Jungian perspective and psychologist James Hillman's views on archetypal imagery seem to confirm my view of the 'Tiatriste' portraits as archetypal images. Also see Tiatriste and Jungian Archetypes
For Freud, there is no such thing as nonverbal thinking; the unconscious is accessed through words. For Jung, on the other hand, the unconscious is accessed through images. These images appear to us in dreams, fantasy, visions, imagination, and hallucinations. These images are how the unconscious communicates with us.
Again contrary to Freudian psychoanalysis, Jung maintained that, underneath this unconscious, there lay another unconscious, which he called first the phylogenetic and then the collective unconscious.
For Jung, this collective unconscious is not filled with images. It is filled with archetypes. Jung likened these archetypes to Kantian categories — that is, to a priori conditions for possible experiences. Jung proposed extending the Kantian idea of the logical categories of reason to the production of fantasy; the archetypes, Jung says, are “categories of the imagination.”
Archetypes thus are form without content; they are possibilities of images. Although they are themselves without content, they are often, on the basis of the images whose form they provide, named after mythological figures — the Hera archetype, for example, or the Wise Old Man archetype; or they may be named for some abstract theme, such as the archetype of engulfment or the archetype of rebirth.
We can distinguish archetypal images from ordinary images because archetypal images appear to us on a wave of emotion; they possess salience and depth; they are numinous and mysterious. It is these same archetypal images that appear as motifs in myths, legends, fairy tales, literature, and art around the world, arising out of the same set of archetypes in the shared collective unconscious. As Joseph Campbell famously put it, dreams are private myths, and myths are public dreams.
There is thus a distinction between an archetype and an archetypal image, a distinction that Jungians — and even Jung himself — have often failed to maintain consistently. There is no access to the archetypes of the collective unconscious; they are transcendental and unrepresentable. All we have are archetypal images, which conform to the a priori conditions imposed by their archetypes. The collective unconscious is a negative borderline concept, just as unknowable as the Kantian thing in itself. We know of the archetypes only through a form of transcendental deduction from numinous images.
Moreover, there is clearly no one-to-one relationship between archetype and image. A single archetype can give rise to any number of archetypal images; and a single archetypal image may — or perhaps may not — be of two different archetypes at the same time. If the relationship between archetype and image is many-to-many, then the relationship between an image and any particular archetype becomes indeterminate.
Just how many archetypes are there? There appears to be no constraint on their number or nature. Steven Walker, a scholar of comparative literature sympathetic to Jung, says that “the list of archetypes is nearly endless.” There can be an archetype for just about any possible human situation, it seems; and conversely each archetype can produce an indefinite number of archetypal images. And apparently we can make up archetypes at will.
And if the person who has produced the numinous image gets to decide with which mythic motif or fairy tale situation it most clearly resonates, then it is not clear why we need to postulate transcendental archetypes of the collective unconscious at all.
Psychologist James Hillman faced this issue squarely, and he chose to eliminate the noun archetype altogether, while preserving the adjective archetypal. The problem, he says, is that Jung moved “from a valuation adjective to a thing and invented substantialities called archetypes… Then we are forced to gather literal evidence from cultures the world over and make empirical claims about what is defined to be unspeakable and irrepresentable.”
But we do not need to take the idea of the archetypal in this reified sense. Any image can be archetypal, Hillman says; it need only be given value — archetypalized or capitalized — by the person experiencing it. “By attaching archetypal to an image,” he says, “we ennoble or empower the image with the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance.”
Still, if what we are looking for is the meaning of images — in dreams, visions, imagination, fantasy — then it is worthwhile, I think, to pursue that meaning wherever we can. We do not need to postulate a collective unconscious or the existence of archetypes to pursue that meaning across cultures and through history, or to place our own images in the vast context of human suffering and transformation. The purpose is to give our dreams and visions life-giving depth, overflowing with meaning and power — what Hillman calls “unfathomable analogical richness.”
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With regards to photography and the archetypal image..
Vince Aletti spoke on photography at the symposium on the current state of the field (of photography), held at SFMOMA in April 2010, was the first in a series of public programs on photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-
"If absolute truth were the only thing photography had to offer, it would have disappeared a century ago. Photography isn't merely a window on the world, it's a portal into the unconscious, wide open to fantasies, nightmares, obsessions, and the purest abstraction, as envisioned by Julia Margaret Cameron, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Joel-Peter Witkin, Laurie Simmons, and Adam Fuss."* * * * *
*ALEX FERNANDES in conversation with Ranjit Hoskote ( Archetypal Images, Fractal Diversity )
Extract from the book Retrieval Systems, edited by Ranjit Hoskote ((New Delhi: Art Alive, 2009)
Ranjit Hoskote: Alex, let’s go back to the beginning of our project. ‘Retrieval Systems’ evolved from my interest in memory as a condition, a resource, an archive or reserve of impulses, enigmas, images, complexes and patterns that all human beings, and certainly artists, draw upon constantly. What role does memory play in your art?
Alex Fernandes: One’s memory is what creates the ‘race mind’ and ‘racial consciousness’, as Jung puts it. The Goan portraits, particularly of the ‘Tiatristes’, reflect this racial consciousness.
RH: Alex, the trope of a ‘race mind’ sounds strange coming from you, given your publicly stated and marvellously practised openness to diversity. Although Jung never intended it that way, this term can sound dangerously fascist and ethnocentric. Shifts in world politics as well as intellectual history after 1945 have ensured that we now regard anything said to be founded in ‘race’ with wariness and scepticism. Do you think ‘regional’ might be a more valid description than ‘racial’?
AF: Ranjit, my reference to the ‘race mind’ and ‘racial consciousness’ may not be politically correct, as you point out it. I agree that Jung never intended it that way. He realised the reality of psyche and thought the mythic archetype contained in the psyche had autonomy, an agency beyond the individual. He proposed that the archetype had a dual nature – it exists both in the psyche and in the world at large. This is what Jung meant when he introduced the notion of a race mind, and proposed the archetypes of a racial consciousness.
Now, with reference to the ‘archetypal figures’ in the ‘Tiatristes’ portrait series. An ‘archetype’ is something we all experience and know intimately from the inside. Indefinable, an archetype is like a psychological instinct or informational field of influence which patterns our psyche, our experience of the world around us and how we experience ourselves. Archetypes are the image-making factor in the psyche, informing and giving shape to the images in our mind and the dreams of our soul, and as such, they insist on being approached imaginatively.
RH: So you draw on reservoirs or receptacles of memory. What sort of mental or physical archives or iconographies or narratives do you work with?
AF: Somewhere in the Goan psyche, we have archetypal figures of who we were as a race, a culture, and this is where we draw from to express our fantasy. We even recognise fictional characters as entities whose behaviour we might predict, with whom we may sympathise. What makes the character of Ganesha recognisable to worshippers as a god, for instance? Ironically, archetypes are not learned. They are inborn tendencies to experience the world. Strictly speaking, archetypal figures such as the Bhatkar, the Sasumai, the fisherwoman and so on are not archetypes, but archetypal images that have crystallised out of the archetypes. The images are objective, but universal.
My portraits of the ‘Tiatristes’ in their exaggerated stage garb, along with the viewer’s involvement, create a readily identifiable fantasy. This imagery, I believe, comes from a universal memory.
Strangely enough the great Goan cartoonist, Mario de Miranda, in his drawings of Goans has archetypal images of Goans that are almost identical with my ‘Tiatristes’ portraits. The archetypes had synchronically manifested themselves in Tiatre, in Mario’s work, and in my portraits. Such synchronicities are from a universal memory.
RH: Your ‘Tiatristes’ and ‘Goan Musicians’ portrait series encode and preserve a lively account of a specific subculture. Clearly childhood memory and subcultural knowledge play a major role in your imaginative process.
AF: As a second-generation Roman Catholic Goan born in Dhobi Talao, South Bombay, I had spent all of my adult life being disassociated from mainstream Goan culture. I spoke Konkani only with my grandmother, and English was the primary language of conversation at home and elsewhere. The cosmopolitan life in Bombay exposed me to various influences and I was never really a ‘Tiatre’ fan. But living in Dhobi Talao, one would often bump into famous ‘Tiatristes’, since most of them lived in close proximity to Sonapur Church and were a common spectacle after Sunday mass.
Dhobi Talao has been described by many as the “Goan enclave of Bombay” with its ‘kudds’ or clubs for Goan seamen in transit, and for Goan restaurants that served authentic Goan pork and beef dishes, and the joints run by ‘Aunties’ during the Prohibition period. It was a natural hangout for famous Goan musicians like Chris Perry, who lived close by in Dabul, Chic Chocolate, Micky Correa, and others. I remember seeing the great Mario Miranda with his friend the late ‘Busybee’ (Behram Contractor), sipping chai with their snacks at Kayani’s.
Western music in India was pioneered by Goans. My fondest memories of Goan musicians were at the Bistro café at Flora Fountain, where my father would often take us to see performances by jazz quartets made up of Goan trumpeters, double bass players, a pianist and a vocalist. In my later youth, Rang Bhavan near St Xavier’s College was the place to go to for open-air jazz and rock performances.
In the early 1970s in Bombay, I saw the first ‘hippies’ in Colaba near Hotel Stiffles and the surrounding areas. I thought their unconventional lifestyles were “really cool”, so to say. Later, this fad was reflected in the ideologies and lifestyle of my days at Elphinstone College in Bombay.
RH: We make discoveries all the time! So you were my senior at Elphinstone. And you were there in that golden decade when the campus of this elite college was divided between the tripping-out, cloud-head culture people and the class-warfare theoreticians and hunger-striking activists of the far Left?
AF: I loved every moment of those years at Elphinstone, the college canteen being the most frequented place.
RH: It was, for some students, like a Goa beach in the middle of Bombay’s colonial quarter!
AF: Speaking of Goa beaches, it was by no accident that my early ‘unsupervised’ vacations in Goa took me straight to the North Goa beaches and the beach parties. It was like being ‘Alex in Wonderland’! I still remember the trance parties at ‘Disco Valley’ in Vagator in the early 1990s with people like 'Goa Gil' playing his very special Goa psychedelic music. Dreadlocked Goa freaks adorned with tattoos, body piercings and freaky party costumes kicked up huge clouds of red dust whilst dancing to that psychedelic Goa trance music. Most of my work in Goa relies on these memories as a link to the ‘Goan race mind’.
RH: Alex, what a fantastic account! You should write a memoir. But again, you speak of a ‘Goan race mind’ but actually describe and celebrate an incredibly confluential gathering of diverse people of various cultural, religious, social and continental origins, all coming together in a new and redemptive fusion through cultural expression.
AF: ‘Goan psyche’ would be a more appropriate term. I agree, ‘race mind’ definitely implies jackboots, swastikas and Sieg Heils. I am definitely one who celebrates the confluential gatherings of diverse peoples.
RH: In what does the importance of memory reside, in your view? And could there sometimes also be a negative, sinister or debilitating aspect to memory?
AF: Memory is what gives us our character, and our various personalities, however diverse we may be. We inherit this first as genetic information from our parents and ancestors and then by observing traditions, rituals and everyday life patterns. Memory creates close tribal bonds via information that is passed on from one generation to the next generation, along with newly modified patterns of information of that current generation.
Cultural hegemony and intolerance for others would be a negative aspect of the ‘race mind’ or ‘racial consciousness’, if left unchecked. To forget that we are all ultimately connected even though we are diverse would be a negative aspect.
RH: Meaning, it would be negative if we got stuck in a specific ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ or other kind of exclusivist memory and forgot the larger, more capacious, universal and unifying ‘species memory’?
AF: That is exactly how I see it. You see, we humans evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago. From there to this point in time we have seen genetic and cultural diversity and the rise and fall of many civilisations. I don’t think evolution as a process will stop with our generation. I honestly think that to get stuck with ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ memories while missing out on the ‘species memory’ is not very wise.
RH: Does the prospect of the loss of memory, both at the level of the individual mind and that of a civilisational corpus, terrify you? Do you think memory can oscillate between active and latent states, become dormant and be translated, reactivated, retrieved afresh years or centuries later?
AF: The genetic information inside the cell that propagates evolution is never a result of random accidents, or as Darwin suggests, that information came from natural selection rather by an intelligent design. If we go by Darwin’s theory of natural selection (use it or lose it theory), he suggests that organisms lost memory of genetic information as they evolved into different species. The theory of natural selection would reduce the amount of genetic information that is carefully stored in each strand of DNA. It is DNA that determines the nature of the physical being and contains the inherited memory of all generations. As we now know, DNA doesn’t dump information, but merely transforms these instructions into various organisms at an appropriate time by turning on and off various combinations of amino acids based on an intelligent design.
RH: Can you conceive of a world structured on the principle of amnesia?
AF: It would be highly unlikely, as this memory is recorded at a genetic level in the DNA for every generation of every living species. In the unlikely event that such a catastrophe takes place, at the most intimate level you would find a loss of family bonds, and from this would follow the feeling of disassociation from each other as a species.
The beautiful fractal diversity of genes that gives us various traditions and cultures would vanish into a bland world, a world without the love, emotions and thoughts that make us what we are – human.
Also see Tiatriste and Jungian Archetype
Lens-ing It
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*PERFORMING A LIFE,
LIVING A PERFORMANCE
Alex Fernandes: ‘Tiatristes’ - RANJIT HOSKOTE
Alex Fernandes bears witness to a unique subculture within the performing arts in his suite of 30 black-and-white portraits, titled ‘Tiatristes’. His subjects are the actors of the Tiatr, each costumed and posed as the character that he or she plays on stage. The Tiatr form, whose name marks a version of the Portuguese teatro, could perhaps be described as an urban folk opera: it was developed, originally, by émigré Goans who worked in colonial Bombay. These men, Catholic as well as Hindu, were haunted by nostalgia for the villages they had left behind; they sought to recreate, in the confines of their metropolitan life, something of the atmosphere of their home culture. And so they riffed on the conventions of Goa’s folk drama idioms, their scripts animated by exchanges between stock characters like the Landlord and the Priest, the Mother-in-law and the Hindu Gentleman.
These characters were never mere place-holders in an immutable script that held them captive in a tableau vivant of Tradition. The actors infused these representatives of the Goan social structure with the breath and marrow of particularity, through the insertion of mannerisms and the salting of the dialogues with the jokes of the moment, contemporary political references, social satire and unsparing wit. The Tiatr is a versatile entertainment, admitting of a range of tonalities from the sophisticated comedy of manners to roustabout and burlesque. Arising in the Goan diaspora, the metropolitan variations of Tiatr were soon gathered into an independent idiom that found its way back to Goa.
‘Tiatristes’ is a sequence of exquisite portraits, testifying to the adroit balance between affection and irony, the attentive and the ludic, that Fernandes has brought to his sitters. We find the Bhatkar here in his golfer’s cap, and the Elvis gel-alike in his flamboyant shirt, strumming his guitar to an anthem of youth; and we meet the Fat Lady, an operatic cliché come to life in the most zestful fashion. There is the Hindu Gentleman, with his blending of Eastern and Western sartorial choices, symptomatic of a marriage of Indic and European legacies in habit and outlook; and there are the women who show off their outrageous wigs, arrangements that demonstrate the balance between the risk of absurdity and the pleasure of quixotry.
The photographic portrait of the Tiatriste, costumed and posed, is an intriguing double-layered performance: it is the image of an actor who is acting the part of an actor identified with a particular role. The role, with the peculiarities of character associated with it, is being prepared; the actor watches himself or herself stepping into and holding that role; the actor also watches the photographer, arranging himself or herself in response to the recording eye of the lens, performing for the benefit of the camera, which has taken the place usually reserved for the theatre audience. The figures that we see in these portraits are at once self and not-self: they operate in the space of transition between experience and fantasia, aspiration and achievement. By an elegant existential algebra, they are engaged in the life of performance, and equally, they are busy with the performance of life.
Unlike the caricatures that the popular Hindi cinema employs to represent regional cultures – such figures are stereotypes, not archetypes – the Tiatristes play out readily identifiable personae in whom the audience has strong emotional investments, at a personal as well as a collective level. Through their interpretations, they can exteriorise and provide a safety valve for the potentially disruptive energies of resentment and mutiny that every hierarchically ordered society would nourish; they also allow for the genial confrontation of problems that afflict the body collective, and for the anticipation and recognition of crisis in the public sphere.
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This suite of portraits has its origins in a month-long project that Fernandes shaped for himself in 2005, spending time with the Tiatristes in Goa and attempting to form an understanding of their motivations and artistic objectives, their relationship with a changing audience in a period dominated by the omnipresent electronic entertainment media. Fernandes, who was born to a Goan family in Bombay in 1963, came to portraiture by indirection; at a certain point in his life, he found himself in the Middle East, working for a Kodak distributor called Ashraf & Co. This distributor owned high-end portrait studios all over the region: the services they offered were expensive and very much by appointment; the clientele comprised upper-class Arab families who wished to memorialise themselves and their key private occasions in discreet yet opulent photographic images.
Fernandes began to make his first portraits in this setting, with access to the best materials and techniques, and periodic re-training in Switzerland. These experiences, along with the dialogues that he has had with his clients over the years, both at a verbally articulated and a tacit level, have led him to identify what he calls his main skill: “It is the ability to recognise what the sitter wants to represent himself or herself as.” Having enjoyed the privilege of sitting for Fernandes, I would call this his special gift of telepathic sensitivity.
Deploying lighting, composition, conversation and the gradual ease of duration as his threads, the photographer weaves an alliance with his sitter, which will be registered for posterity as the image that they produce together. Alex Fernandes’ portraits are, accordingly, a blend of the subject’s self-image at the moment of photography and the artist’s sensitive scrutiny, both participants in this drama guessing at the effects of their interplay on the third and as-yet-invisible participant, the viewer.
We enter these portraits when we look at them; we enter the private domain as well as the social milieu of the sitter; we engage with the photographer who is social psychologist as well as archivist, his sensibility attuned to the finest fluctuations of the cultural barometer that is the Tiatr. As we dwell on Alex Fernandes’ portraits of the Tiatristes, we become ever more keenly aware – in the presence of the Photograph, once believed to be the ultimate measure of actuality – how all reality is a construct, all life is a performance, a game of appearances, desires, dreams and hopes, a lila.
(Bombay: Winter 2007)
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Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, art critic, cultural theorist and curator. He is the author of thirteen books, including five collections of poetry, five studies of art and artists, an edited anthology of contemporary verse, a translation, and a cultural history.
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*INCOGNITO (Wigs and costumes in Tiatre)
These portraits show an interesting set of character transformations the Tiatre actors underwent using wigs and costumes.
Though some of these transformations are subtle, others could be at the extreme ends of the spectrum, even going as far as cross dressing.
Click Here for Slide show
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*PhotographerCatherine Opie talks about her work...
Though some of these transformations are subtle, others could be at the extreme ends of the spectrum, even going as far as cross dressing.
Click Here for Slide show
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*PhotographerCatherine Opie talks about her work...
Artist Catherine Opie discusses identity and how it is perceived and shaped through portraits of close friends in the Los Angeles lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and transvestite community. Part of the Voice of the Photography series created for the Annenberg Space for Photography inaugural exhibit L8S ANG3LES. (March - July, 2009)
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*LENS-ING IT: About This Curatorial Intervention
by Johny ML, curator
"Alex Fernandes, born and brought up in a Mumbai neighborhood where Goans are settled, once relocated to Goa a few years back after his sojourn in different countries in the Middle East and also after relocating himself as a photography artist after a decade long career in the field of advertisement, devotes his time to create ‘series’ of ‘types’ of people who in the popular imagination represent Goa. The artist de-constructs the ‘stereotypes’ created by the popular movies and other popular narratives about Goans and in its place, establishes a series of ‘archetypes’ of people who in reality constitute the ‘racial character’ of a society. For the artist, racial character is not a term of insult on the contrary he, going by the Jungian ideas frames them as characters that determine the cultural make up of a society. Alex Fernandes is deeply political when he chooses these archetypal characters from the local theatre performers called Tiatriste and in imparting them with iconic status in the simulated studio portraits. In another series, keeping his aesthetics of studio portraits, he continues with idea of finding the archetypal Goan through the portrayal of the musicians in Goa."* * * * *
*Tiatriste William de Courtorim and his motorbike.
