Between Seeing and Being Seen: Still City and Its Portrait of Mumbai

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit writes, “The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.” Examining what walking implies, Solnit proposes an “interplay” of sorts, between the act of walking, the imagination that accompanies it and the sheer range of possibilities held by the world(s) being invented by the walker. Cities like Mumbai—large metropoles with great stewing cauldrons of industrial, financial and sociocultural capital—are sewn together by invisible labour and visible difference. They are amalgamations of the human condition, where every cross-sectional slice of life produces a staggering congestion of varieties. What does a visualisation of such contrasts entail?

Still City (2017) is a short film co-directed by five students—Sayan Bhattacharjee, Madhumoy Satpathy, Sukrita Baruah, Vilo Awomi and Mrudula Ravi—as part of their third semester course on filmmaking at the School of Media and Cultural Studies, TISS. They proposed this filmic enquiry as a response to a prompt on the city’s streets that invited them to think about spaces of accessibility and inclusivity. The group chose to scrutinise the relationship that photographers have with the streets of Mumbai and the people that they photograph. This became a means of reflecting upon how specific marginalised areas become routes to a mediation of the genre-category of the street as a thematic in photography. Over a Zoom conversation with Bhattacharjee and Baruah, followed by a phone call with Ravi, I was able to grasp a sense of why this particular ingress into the city of Mumbai became a significant, self-reflexive quest for the group.

In the opening montage of the twenty-five-minute-long film, sounds of the city reach you before the sights do. Positing an engagement with marginal voices that “picture” the city, the film begins its journey in Chor Bazaar, following a paid photo-walk exploring the area. Cameras crowd around a repairman and the sparks flying from his machines; amateurs lean, bend and kneel in the hope for the perfect frame, supervised by walk leaders who suggest improvements on composition and lighting. One encounters a range of perspectives from the participating photographers exploring areas like slums and markets: they work in groups to avoid awkward confrontations as well as to combat the fear of getting into trouble. Some talk of the ease of photographing with zoom lenses in order to keep a safe distance from one’s subjects; for others, it is imperative that they contrast formal portraiture with the aesthetic of candid photography to juxtapose a creative pairing of spontaneity and premeditation.

Speaking about the process of arriving at such a theme, Baruah recollects moving from thinking about CCTV surveillance to wondering about her own recreational practices of photography out in the city. Susan Sontag’s crucial text On Photography became a point of departure, and the group sat down to think about how their theoretical pursuits in the classroom could have a role to play in fleshing out these enquiries. The self-reflexive turn in the film, according to Ravi, came with wanting to look at how photographers are positioned vis-à-vis their subjects, and the power dynamics that come into play in acknowledging the vulnerabilities that suffuse what they choose to document. A tricky navigation of their own complicities as producers, Still City manages to bring out questions of agency, visibility, representation and appropriation. Cognisant of how an educational institution can offer frameworks, and more importantly, the time and headspace to cultivate and experiment with modes of making; this exercise led the co-directors to seek and find alternatives to the stereotypical angles that definitions of street photography can take.

Anushree Fadnavis and Gopal MS are two photographers that the filmmakers chose to spotlight for their documention of Mumbai through sensitive approaches. Neither of them presents a radical break in practice, but the difference between their methodologies—and the imagery masquerading as street photography—arises in the tactfulness of both Fadnavis and Gopal. The former, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for Reuters, documented her daily journey in the women’s compartment of a Mumbai local. Befriending her subjects and representing them as people with stories to tell, her photographs capture women at leisure, on their way to work or returning home—all in the throes of an everydayness that is not fabricated. At the heart of Gopal’s routine is his search for a new story and he finds these in the oratory capacities of the human and the non-human. Following historical trails and the novelty of different local customs in the eastern and central suburbs, Gopal’s subject remains the city of Mumbai, its confines and the spillages that pour out of homes and workspaces, highlighting the residents who orchestrate it all.

Both Bhattacharjee and Baruah agree that the film does not outline any kind of a definitive manifesto for street photography; instead, it appeals to the image-maker in all of us. Formulating a critique that was posed as considerations—back then, as young students—for the group, Still City garnered much appreciation for the same reasons. For Ravi, the film marked a turning point in her foray into filmmaking, encouraging her to un-learn her biases as an observer and as a maker. In its success, Still City initiated a space for dialogue; and in various instalments of the IIHS Urban Lens Film Festival across the country, it generated rich discussion around how cities come to be inhabited, mapped and remembered by people.

All images from Still City by Sayan Bhattcharjee, Vilo Awomi, Mrudula Ravi, Madhumoy Satpathy and Sukrita Baruah. Mumbai, 2017. Images courtesy of the artists and SMCS, TISS.