George Town Unobscured
Penang as a regional art centre
Waswo X. Waswo

A large crowd was also in attendance during the opening
talk by Maggie Steber at her exhibition, The Audacity of
Beauty. The venue, at George Town’s soon-to-officially-open
Camera Museum, was a heritage building, now beautifully
renovated and fitted for exhibitions. Documenting a thirty
years passage of time through the nation of Haiti’s turbulent
history, Steber’s images and talk, perhaps, encapsulated
the thematic focus of the Obscura Festival of Photography.
Though each exhibition of the photo festival held its own
artistic sincerity and displayed the obvious talents of the
invited photographers, there was too strong an undercurrent
of morose investigations into tragedy, poverty, and social
ills. Suzanne Lee explored child labour in India’s mines,
Ian Teh constructed an austere look of the scarring of
Chinese landscape during its rush to modernization, and
Andri Tambunan photographed the AIDS epidemic in
Papua, Indonesia. Perhaps due to Festival Director Vignes
Balasingham’s own preference for the documentary, and the
usage of photography as a tool for exposing social injustice,
the festival as a whole became, with a few exceptions, one
long journey through painful terrains. Pablo Bartholomew’s
extremely personal “Outside-In” was, of course, a notable
exception to this pattern, as was Bharat Choudhary’s The
Silence of ‘Others’. Choudhary, who hails from Bengal, set
about defining a positive and life-affirming image of Muslims
to be purposely set in contrast with the negative “terrorist”
image constructed each day through the evening news. His
photographs managed to, at once, be a hard-hitting social
document, as well as contain spiritual and aesthetic beauty