If Sontag's essay aroused discussion in the photographic community, it did not -- to judge from Asia -- significantly alter photographic praxis. A "search for the photogenic" inspires much of this work, despite a hundred-odd years of colonization, and counter-colonization, civil and imperial wars, and a flood of Western ideas, influences and objects which have redrawn Asia since Thompson's Illustrations. The portraits by Kevin Bubriski (Tamang Shaman, Nepal and Tati Pani, West Nepal among them) and Michael Dieuzaide (Inde, Rhadjastan, Palais D'Amber and Rhadjastan, Jaipur) reiterate what we learned in the pages of Life, Look and The National Geographic. There are turbaned men who stare impassively at the camera, and women -- veiled to prevent just such visual intrusions as the camera threatens -- who do not. There are ragged children. The Ganges still floods. Women bathe and wash their saris at the riverbank. There are actual camels, nomads and crumbling architecture. Djan Seylan's Untitled #10, of two young women bearing bricks on their heads, Max Pam's solitary East Tibetan Nomad and Mireille Dupuis's Sri Lanka series of women bathing and young brown boys at play are all too familiar. More contemporary and individual seeing is evident in Pam's curious study of two solemn young men on display at some kind of fair (Two Rahasthanis at an Outdoor Studio), and Seylan's gentle image which appears to be about an elephant and only incidentally to include a young girl who has lost a leg (Kardon, Sri Lanka).
Much of the work suffers from the use of a very narrow selection from each photographer, and from an apparent insistence on choosing the most traditional and photogenic examples. Pam's excluded work, in particular, was fresh, enthusiastic and intimate in its encounter with people, countryside and daily events. The surreptitious photographs from the People's Republic of China, by Ana Xian, are also too small a selection to do more than promise insight into that hidden country. Xian, Shanxi, a dresser top with toilet articles, and Shanghai, PRC, a family photographed in one spare, all-purpose room, are sensitive works in the documentary mode, but more is needed.
Traveling with a minimum of excess cultural baggage and the most fully articulated personal vision are Michel Delaborde and Linda Connor. The kind of false familiarity which informs so many travel photographs does not exist in these. These photographers are obviously visitors: eager, receptive and prudently cautious, they see Asia with both respect and wonder. Delaborde's crisp, restrained color prints are the gleanings of a solitary, early-morning wanderer. A knot of blue-suited old men surround something we cannot see -- a game of chance perhaps -- in a modern park (Canton 1981); a lone woman with her back to the camera sweeps the silent street (Shanghai 1982); the photographer maintains a distance which is unobtrusive and somehow appropriate in a foreign country. In Pekin 1982, Delaborde photographs a city intersection from a high vantage point, providing a grayed map on which a maze of arrows directs dozens of cyclists through the immaculate square, as well as perhaps the most culturally revealing image on exhibit. (Try, for comparison, to imagine Union Square, San Francisco, without cars, noise, pollution, transients, trash or pigeon shit . . . )
Connor, having abandoned her soft-focus lens, acknowledges, in India and Nepal, the coexistence of ancient structures -- architectural and social -- and vast numbers of very poor people. She neither ignores nor idealizes the people; they are simply there. Connor is also there, taking pictures, and the people watch her or go about their business. Remarkably, since these images were made with a cumbersome view camera, Connor's works are the most like ordinary seeing done without a camera, and thus the least self-conscious or contrived. In Sleeping Baby, Kathmandu, Nepal, young native kibitzers in Western dress hover at the edge of the frame while the photographer focuses on a small space in which a sleeping baby, a rough mat, and some plain cooking utensils are kept. Small Temple, which centers on a rather grim statue and scans the panorama of old architecture, rubble and people shopping or waiting, and Hood, Kathmandu, Nepal, which pictures a severed animal leg on a rough wooden bench with the hatchet and cleaver which did the job, both convey an authentic and nonjudgmental wonderment at what there is to see.
Quite alone in this exhibition are the Fresson prints by Pier Mahaim. These abstractions of timeless misted mountains and tiny men plying junks on infinite waters are barely photographic. Rather than looking at Asia, Mahaim attempts to look through it by synthesizing French photographic romanticism and traditional Eastern print vocabularies. Mahaim's work, inspired far more by myth, memory and desire than by visual encounter, functions for this exhibit as an insistence on the romantic posture which the curator finds appropriate for photographing the rest of the world.
Asia is a curiously unfocused exhibit. It contains superb, as well as very ordinary, images, but as a whole it asks no questions and encourages no dialog among the ten artists. Like a package tour, it offers almost too little of anything for us to feel that we have really been there. For the most part, it seems to assert some natural right to appropriate the world photographically, to use the camera as "a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed" (Diane Arbus). The exceptions, those photographers who carry their "passport" with both curiosity and respect, and who consider the people and places they see to be as important as the photographs they secure, provide Asia with its meaning.
