Your Studio Crumbled And Died
– Joyona Medhi

Daffodils gave way to diamonds,
Bicycles went out of fashion,
Butterflies shed their wings and cried,
Your studio crumbled and died…

The saint Paul daily globe, a newspaper of note in minnesota, on the fine sunday morning of January the 12th, 1896, carried a piece with the heading “Is he an artist?”. It was followed by the even more pinching “Photographer can make no valid claim to the title”. adding salt to the wounds it reiterated again, “Photography is mechanical”, Period. It left you to digest that point blank.


Putting it in context, those were days of battle between painting and photography. Both however reeked with man’s desire to stay on, or the clichéd “leaving something behind” to be “remembered by”. Portraits of dead babies, of wives and mistresses of dukes and earls in all their grandeur, of subjects the colonial powers ruled over, of lands owned, horses bought, places travelled, are few of the many instances we recall when thinking of the portrayal of self, posing in a frozen manner before expensive large format studio cameras, and subsequently freezing time leading to what felt like partaking in the creation of history itself.