Making a Photograph: Pictorialism, Craft and the Legacy of D.R. Mody

On the far wall of the Dilip Piramal Gallery in Mumbai is the profile of a child’s face. Eyes screwed shut, he holds between his clenched teeth some small offering—a seed, a bit of bread—for a parrot that extends its beak to take it. The gesture between boy and animal suggests intimacy and ease. And yet, very little about this image is unintentional. Approaching the photograph, the viewer begins to notice details—the soft focus that sharpens some parts of the image and blurs others, the outline of each individual tooth—that reveal a careful hand at work, a presence between subject and image that is not so much documenting a moment as crafting it. 

Titled “Snatch it”, the photograph is part of DADA - An Accidental Pictorialist, an exhibition built from the photographic archive of Shri Dhirajlal R. Mody (or Dada), a textile dyer, hobbyist photographer and founding member of the Photographic Society of India (PSI). Curated by Veerangana Kumari Solanki and conceptualised by Tapan Mody, grandson of D.R. Mody, the exhibition situates the photographer’s work within the tradition of Pictorialism, a movement that privileged principles of beauty and composition over those of record-keeping, approaching the photographic medium as an art form rather than a tool for documentation. 

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as critic Robert J. Hirsch documents in Seizing the Light (2017), photographers in Europe and America began to resist the dominant emphasis on “photography’s machinelike authenticity,” embracing, instead, the ability “to suppress unwanted detail, add colors, alter the tonal range, and synthesize negatives.”

Taking their cue from these early Pictorialists, Jyotindra Jain argues in “Pictorialist Photography in Bombay at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” (2022), photographers in India “asserted photography's claim to the traditional notion of 'high art,'” adopting a playful, interventionist approach to the medium in contrast with the “snapshot documentary photography of the early Kodak era.” Among this new wave of photographers was D.R. Mody, a dyer at the Indian Bleaching and Dyeing Company whose first encounters with film occurred in a makeshift darkroom in the corridors of his family home. 

DADA charts Mody’s creative journey from early experiments to institution building through a careful and substantial selection of photographs from his corpus. The exhibition—a reframing of a body of work discovered by Tapan Mody after his grandfather’s death—is a rich and full presentation: works displayed in their original mounts, as large-scale vinyl prints (as in ‘Snatch it’), in lightboxes, and on a screen.Thematically, the exhibition unfolds in three parts, corresponding, per Solanki’s curatorial note, to “three primary layers of Dada’s archives.” Opening the show are images with subjects ranging “from landscape and architecture to portraiture and animals,” providing a broad overview of Mody’s concerns. From here, the viewer moves to a second, more experimental section, featuring the photographer’s work with colour photographs. Bringing the exhibition to a close is a section that explores Mody’s role in establishing the PSI, illustrated through a vitrine of personal effects and archival documents.  

In a blog post titled “Photo Fiction” from 2016, the photographer Dayanita Singh argues that “the photographer is a storyteller, he must use whatever means he finds suitable to best tell the story he wants you to hear.” In Mody’s work, as in that of the broader Pictorialist movement, there is profound investment in the narrative possibilities of the photograph, the stories that can be told (or retold) through craft and technical intervention. This approach is variously expressed across the exhibition, sometimes less immediately—as in the case of “Snatch it,”—at other times more obviously.

Opening the second section of the exhibition, for instance, are three compositionally identical images grouped under Parrot Series. In contrast with section one, which is made up of uniformly monochromatic photographs, each image in Parrot Series possesses an almost jarring vividness, the choice of colours and saturation giving it the quality of a postcard, rather than that of a photograph.

Per Mody’s son, Siddharth Mody, the photographs were tinted manually, “pixel by pixel” (colour film would only reach India in the 1950s); an intervention revealed, also, by the fact that the three images are far from uniform in their rudimentary colour grading. For Solanki, the exhibition is an opportunity to “think about what the process of creating a photograph was back then” and to consider the hours that Mody, a hobbyist photographer in the early days of Indian photography, spent in pursuit of a beautiful image. DADA leans into the photographer’s craft, presenting photographs in various stages of mediation—photographic multiples openly displayed, the colourised image hung side by side with its uncolourised predecessor—so that it is possible to identify the specific interventions of the photographer, to learn what he thought would add aesthetic value to the image. 

Mody’s hand reveals itself in many gestures across the show: in the use of colour before colour film, in the exaggerated outlines of subjects, in the existence of multiples, and in the titling of works. While many of the photographs in the exhibition are undated (the curatorial note dates the collection between 1938 and 1954), a substantial portion are thoughtfully titled. Some of these titles are straightforwardly descriptive: “Sabbath Day” for a photograph of worshippers on a path to a church, “Monsoon Mood” for that of a tree silhouetted against a cloudy sky. Others intervene in the image more directly, adding humour or interest to it. “Dam It”, for instance, is the title chosen for a photograph of three girls in matching hats looking down at the sluice gates of a dam (perhaps an engagement with the megaprojects that came to define the twentieth-century Indian landscape), “A Bird in Hand is Worth…” for that of a small bird held in a cupped palm. In Mody’s treatment, titles become a narrative tool, providing one more element for the reader to consider in their reading of the image. 

If Mody’s approach to titles expands how, and by whom, meaning is extracted from the image, this attention to dialogue is reflected in many aspects of his project. The photographer’s most significant collaborator was his brother Sumanlal Mody, with whom he travelled across the country exploring the “techniques, perspectives and possibilities of the camera,” per Solanki’s curatorial note. Together with eighteen others, the Mody brothers sought to create a community in pursuit of craft, establishing the PSI in 1937 to provide a space for amateur photographers. As historian G. Thomas argues in History of Photography, India 1840-1980 (1981), such camera clubs were crucial to the growth of Indian photography in the early twentieth century, serving as “local foci of dissemination of knowledge” at a time “when organised education in photography was non-existent.” A display in the exhibition’s final section makes these communities tangible, bringing together archival objects—a portfolio of member biographies, a set of colour filters, camera straps, a membership card—that provide a window into the lives and aspirations of a small, but significant, community of enthusiasts.

The founding of the PSI is described in the exhibition text as “an important landmark of photography in India”—one that “historicizes” Mody’s practice. It also marks a coalescing of worlds: an endeavour begun by two brothers in make-shift darkrooms turning into a platform that would far exceed them. In its curatorial direction, DADA strikes a delicate balance between the biographical and the artistic, recognising both the tremendously personal nature of Mody’s practice and its significance within the broader trajectory of Indian photography. As Tapan Mody tells me, his grandfather’s project may have been conceived within the home, in dialogue with his brother Sumanlal, but it was never a private project: the photographer showed his work at a number of international exhibitions and “even the friends and family members featured in these photographs were treated as muses or models, not ‘relatives’.” Much marks the presence of the family in DADA—from the role of the grandson as curator to the fact that Mody’s practice ended with the death of his brother. Much also exceeds it. 

Towards the end of the exhibition is a vinyl print, roughly the same size as “Snatch it,” that ties together the many threads of Mody’s artistic story. In it, a very small child kneels, head bowed, between the feet of a massive stone god. The photograph, titled “At the Feet of the Colossus,” was taken in Karnataka, on a family vacation. The child is Mody’s son. The image, Tapan Mody reveals, was first taken with a priest as the subject and then, to make a better picture, with the child. In the work of the Pictorialist, the world is made and remade, some parts erased, others added, so that we move past the question of fidelity to see intervention not as deception, but as craft. 

To learn more about Pictorialist photographers in India, read Sukanya Baskar’s essays on the work of AJ Patel and the shift from Pictorialism to Realism as evident in the Marg 1960 issue on Photography. Also watch the episode of In Person in which Sukanya Baskar provides a walkthrough of O.P. Sharma and the Fine Art of Photography (1950s-1990s).