Abstract
Adil Hasan's When Abba Was Ill stages the aesthetic and ethical tension involved in representations of illness and death. This article aims at parsing through the strategies employed in publishing what was meant to be a private record of the six months during which Hasan's family came to terms with the diagnosis of his father's cancer. On one hand, the article reflects on how the genre of the photobook affords the intimacy of encounter that such a project demands, and on the other, it demonstrates how Hasan's work oscillates between provoking and resisting the reader's identification with the photographs. While the photobook's title promises a retrospective account of the period, this article argues that the book emerges as eventually undercutting its own project. Even as it enacts the script of recollection, the photobook tends to obfuscate the memory of the time by blocking it, deferring its appearance, and ultimately rendering it opaque for readers.
Adil Hasan's photobook When Abba Was Ill recollects the six months leading up to the death of the photographer's father, Mahmood, who was diagnosed with cancer. Comprising eighty photographs, it is a hardbound book measuring 6.25 by 8.25 inches with a beige buckram covering—its size, texture, and colors reminiscent of old personal journals or family albums. The photographs were published by the Nazar Foundation as the second in a series of photography monographs.1 This monograph's launch at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2014 made the images available to a community of “book lovers from across India and the globe” who attend the annual event each year.2 Significantly, Hasan was not the only photographer whose work was showcased at the literary festival. That same year, its attendees could also see Dayanita Singh's photobook File Room (2013), which documents the state of public archives in India. While each of these works deals with the representation of memory in its own distinct way, together their presence attested to the potential of the photobook as the proper medium to convey photographic meaning across a range of subjects. To present photobooks within the ecology of a literary festival envisions a different order of engagement with the photographic text, and perhaps also a wider and more diverse viewership, than is usually afforded by a photo exhibition. It allows photography to be reclaimed from the gilded walls of art galleries in favor of the more immediate space of one's bookshelf. The photobook enables a more private mode of encounter with photographs, a matter of particular significance for such a deeply personal work as Hasan's.
When Hasan relentlessly photographed the time his family grappled with the illness of Abba (meaning “Father” in Urdu), the making of the photobook was not yet in the viewfinder. In his interviews, Hasan claims to have taken those pictures habitually, apparently without much thought about the nature of the photographs or what was to become of them.3 Captured by old family cameras found in haste (a Yashica G and a Kodak), using expired film and processed at a “Quick Service Store that develops films not manually but by machines,”4 the photographs were never intended for public viewing. The decision to eventually publish them was thus fraught with apprehensions about exposing the family's “vulnerable and unguarded moments . . . to the outside world.”5 For over a year, photographer Sanjeev Saith, who insisted that the body of work be made into a photobook, worked as an editor alongside Hasan, questioning him about the photographs, assuaging his anxieties, painstakingly selecting and sequencing them. As Hasan explains, “I was not sure if I should put my father out there. . . . But I also knew it could not just sit around for years being edited. . . . I needed to make that book for my family, my parents’ closest friends, their family, anyone who knew my father.”6
While Hasan's interviews do not elaborate on what he thought would be the import of the book, When Abba Was Ill remains significant as one of those rare examples, at least in the Indian photobook scene, where illness is represented from the perspective of the caregiver. Another work in this vein is Sohrab Hura's self-published Life Is Elsewhere (2015), where he photographs his mother, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.7 Hasan's photobook, however, stands apart for capturing glimpses of the experience of terminal illness, not only for the patient but also for their family who continue to live in the shadow of death. While it would be difficult to ascertain its actual reach and impact, such a photobook, as an artifact of the future, allowing retrospective visitations, may offer a space of redemptive closure and reflection for those who survive the deceased, even at the risk of objectifying illness and death.
When Abba Was Ill stages the aesthetic and ethical tension germane to its publication throughout the book. This article aims at parsing through the strategies the photobook adopts to recollect the period in which the Hasans came to terms with Mahmood's ailment. At a glance, it comes forth as a book about remembering. Right in its title it claims its narrative tense—it is a retrospective account of the routine that ensued after Hasan's father was diagnosed with cancer. Yet, as I argue, the book undercuts its own project. While the architecture of the photobook proves itself to be particularly amenable to an exercise in recollection, representing the processual tension between remembrance and forgetting by rendering the flow of time ambiguous, what the narrative unfolds ultimately remains elusive. This article thus discusses how Hasan's photobook affords the intimacy of encounter that such a project demands, while simultaneously provoking and resisting the reader's identification with the photographs.8 Even as it enacts the script of recollection, his photobook tends to obfuscate the memory of the time by blocking it, deferring its appearance, and ultimately rendering it opaque for the readers.
Books have often been a preferred medium for photographers documenting private experiences of illness and death. One classic instance of their being used for this purpose is Dutch photographer Krass Clement's Ved Døden (1990), which captures the day of his mother's death and the events that followed. As Martin Parr and Gerry Badger emphasize, “The nagging question is why it needed to be a book.” They conclude that, for Clement, the camera acted as a “shield” and the book as “a kind of catharsis and a gift of remembrance.”9 Similarly, British Punjabi-Sikh artist Max Khandola's photobook Illustration of Life (2003), portraying the conditions of his father's terminal cancer, serves as “a memorial to a much-loved father, and an attempt to understand that loss.”10 The making of a book, whereby photographs are reviewed and reframed into a narrative, is seen as an exercise in reconciliation with loss. Besides, the medium of the photobook also makes other kinds of allowances. Discussing French artist Sophie Calle's Rachel, Monique (2012) made on the occasion of her mother's death, Sonia Catherine Wilson notes how the photobook served not merely as a supplement to the ongoing exhibition of the same name but also made it possible to include wide ranging materials, such as excerpts from her mother's diaries, forging new meaning for the work.11 These various affordances of the photobook—its structural capaciousness and status as a commemorative object—becomes integral to Hasan's recollection of his father's death.
While When Abba Was Ill has had many lives, with its most recent exhibition viewing having taken place at the 2021 Should Art Festival in Mumbai, India, it is significant that it was first published as a photobook. The architecture of the book allows a closer encounter with the image than does looking at framed prints on gallery walls from a distance, making it felicitous for engaging with what were meant to be private records. Opening a book is often a solitary exercise performed with an intimate distance between the viewer and the image. Unlike the exposed, exhibitionistic, more public display of framed prints, the book covers and closes; its pages turn and fold, concealing and revealing the images of life, loss, grief, and death at one's discretion.
Recent scholarship on illness narratives has attended to the affective charge of the medium of the book, its potential to move its readers. Stella Bolaki, in discussing artists’ books on cancer, asserts that they should not be viewed merely as expressions of personal loss or catharsis, or a program to influence healthcare; rather, as she emphasizes, these works offer a fresh perspective on the experiences of illness that emerge when the artworks are shared and circulated within a community of readers. In arguing for these books’ ability to “complicate discourses on testimony and witnessing” in the field of medical humanities, she focuses on the “unpredictable and unfinished relational encounters” they generate “through the powerful aesthetic as well as the ethical force of touch.”12 The affordances of the book can activate and regulate the reader's response, largely mediated through its haptic aesthetics.
While one experiences the photobook simultaneously by sight and touch, the latter appears somewhat privileged in Hasan's work. The pages in When Abba Was Ill are ingeniously duplicitous. If one simply flips through the book without quite opening it entirely, the pages appear thicker and relatively unwieldy. This is because throughout the book, seventeen pairs of versos and rectos have gatefolds that open and extend into another page on either side (fig. 1). They are not readily apparent, however, because the pages are somewhat tacky and stick to each other, resisting being unfolded. This decelerates the experience of navigating the book. It requires one to tread attentively, carefully opening the folds. The reader is expected to “play” with the folds, to use Bolaki's term; as she emphasizes, such purposeful designs embedded in artists’ books enable a more immersive experience by activating the flow of the narrative constructed within it.13 The turning of the pages induces a slow, hesitant, and deferred encounter with what lies within.
The gatefolds serve as a crucial narrative device. They help mobilize a double narrative—one narrative, which focuses on Mahmood, plays out within the gatefolds, while the photographs outside them capture another, the experience of his family and their surrounding spaces. Two of the gatefolds feature on their facing pages images of the city at night (figs. 2a–b). With dusty, lifeless trees in the background of industrial structures standing on rubble surrounded by blinding neon lights that overcast the night sky, it is a vision of an urban concrete wasteland. Enveloped beneath this surface lies Abba's degenerating body. When the gatefolds are closed, one sees the city, and upon opening them, one sees Abba. They reflect each other—the city and the individual, withering away together. The folds thus animate a synchronic view of the time when Abba was ill. The gatefolds juxtapose the mundane with the malignant such that the world around, too, appears afflicted.
It is only within the gatefolds that one encounters the image of Abba. If one flips through the text without opening the gatefolds, there would be no glimpse of the eponymous figure. When the gatefolds are closed, the facing page offers only a partial view of what the photobook holds. When unfolded, they present the expansiveness of the book, urging one to explore its interstices of secrecy. The architecture of the gatefolds offers an invitation for the reader to enter the book even as they perform a promise of privacy. The reader, in effect, is made to inhabit the role of guest and intruder at the same time, therefore always unsettled and aware of being an outsider to the narrative. Throughout, the gatefolds remind readers of what Christine Ross calls “precarious attachments” to the text, in that the access to the narrative of Abba's illness is first and foremost made stylistically contingent.14 They also emphasize the reader's embodied encounter with the image through touch and turn of the page, as well as the distancing potential of the image-viewer interface, whereby the fold guards the photographs of Abba from coming into view. In compelling readers to uncover the image, the book directs them toward a cautious and discrete encounter with the photographs of illness. The gatefolds establish an opacity that regulates the reader’s access to the ailing figure of Abba. They foreground the ethical impetus of the photobook to prevent exposing records of private vulnerabilities and struggles. Moreover, the opacity afforded by the gatefolds finds reflection even in the materiality of the photographs themselves, an issue I return to later in this article.
The gatefolds at once conceal and reveal Abba. Upon opening them, one sees him as he was in his final days (fig. 3). Upon closing the fold, he disappears out of sight, and a momentary forgetting of his illness is performed—until the page is turned and the fact of his passing dawns again. Following Gilles Deleuze and Walter Benjamin, Giuliana Bruno, writing on the use of fabric in Wong Kar-Wai's films, considers the structure of the fold. In crafting her innovative sartorial philosophy, she asserts that “the fold of cloth embodies the actual pattern of memory: its iterative way of returning in a repetitive pattern, like undulating pleats.”15 The same can be said of the folds in these pages. They are reliefs on the paper that divide yet attach the adjacent images. As hinges, they enable the gatefolds to open and close, making it possible for the reader to turn from one image to the next. It is through them that memory is shown to unfold in the book. This exercise—unfolding, refolding, turning to the next page—enacts the process of recollection, forgetting, and recognition of what has transpired.
The recollection enacted by the photobook reproduces, rather than restores, memory. While the photographs present themselves as a portal to a time gone by, that past is never quite available as it was but only as it is recollected, both in terms of being remembered and of being reassembled for the purpose of publication. Revisiting the photographs during the editing process, Hasan admits: “My memory took on those negatives. Those were the only things I remember.”16 Such imprinting of photographs into memory, where the former is seamlessly stitched onto the latter, recalls what Roland Barthes called “counter-memory.” According to Barthes, photographs do not bring to mind what once was. Rather, they “block memory,” replace it; the photograph “fills the sight with force,” thereby reproducing memory through the image.17 It is then not so much the moment of the photographic act that congeals in memory; what one comes to remember instead is the moment of encountering the final photographic image. Hasan's photobook then can be thought of as a curation of such counter-memories. For readers of the photobook, the time when Abba was ill becomes accessible only through this reconstruction of memory at a later time.
As an object intended for posterity, the photobook bears multiple temporalities in its making—the past that the photographs capture, the present in which the photobook is published and distributed, and a future in which readers will encounter the book. As Jessie Bond notes, through the photobook, one “moves beyond understanding the individual photographs as a record or document of past events, to experiencing them as part of a narrative event in the moment of encounter. This emergence of meaning, whether linear or more complex, adds another temporal dimension to the photographs as part of the reader's present.”18 But what is the temporal experience that Hasan's photobook creates for the reader?
The folds act as coordinates of time in the book. They allow the turning of the pages through which the process of recollection continues, propelling the reader into a sense of narrative progression. As Hasan remarks, “The first photograph is that of my sister-in-law pointing out something almost like a premonition as you proceed ahead with the book” (fig. 4).19 Moving forward, one finds the premonition being fulfilled. As the gatefolds appear, images depict Abba's gradually declining health, demonstrating the passage of time and the duration of his illness. In its purposeful sequencing, one can almost hear Hasan narrating the story from beginning to end.20 This chronological recollection is not merely a memorialization of the past, but an impersonation of the order in which things unfolded when Abba was ill.
Yet a closer look at the image sequence undercuts the telos of the narrative. Some photographs appear out-of-time, as if displaced from the order of their occurrence, such that the reader is not sure where to imagine them in a narrative sequence. Take, for instance, the image one encounters upon first opening the book. Significantly, it is not the “premonition” of his sister-in-law that Hasan notes as the first photograph of the book. That image only appears after the title page. Sequentially, the first image that the reader encounters is of a bamboo tree, which appears right after the epigraph and before the title page (fig. 5a).
The two images in the adjacent gatefold show Abba standing against the backdrop of the same bamboo tree that appears in the third image (fig. 5b). From left to right, he faces the trees with his back to the camera, then turns toward the camera. He appears healthy, far from the gaunt, bedridden figure one encounters later. It is easy to see this as a chronological narrative of events with Abba simply having stepped out of the frame in the third image. Yet the zoomed-in background in the final image may also be read as complicating the sense of time. The absence of Abba is abrupt and jarring after the previous two images in the sequence. The sudden focus on the backdrop becomes a testament to the irrevocable absence of his passing away. With nothing else in front of it, what was once the background has now become the foreground. One looks upon the scene with the memory of something that no longer exists. In this way, the narrative may be seen as beginning from a time after when Abba was ill, following the event of his passing.
The chronological unfolding of the book is further troubled by the lack of page numbers. Entirely unpaginated, the book encourages the reader to open to any page and move in any direction. From a bookmaking point of view, deciding the serial order in which page numbers are to be assigned in a text full of gatefolds would have been an onerous task. But what could have been a choice for convenience may be seen as serving a vital narrative function. The missing page numbers, it can be argued, suggest that the sequence of the photographs in the book are indeed arbitrary and do not necessarily direct a specific narrative progression.
For example, the last four images of the book capture the same setting—a hall with white walls, with columns on the left and windows on the right. Each photograph depicts rows of chairs and a long bench arranged for people to sit with ceiling fans whirring above. If one follows the normative way of reading, from left to right, the space becomes gradually deserted, suggesting that people have left the room (figs. 6a–d). However, if one turns the pages starting from the end, the room appears increasingly populated, with more people arriving in each photograph. In effect, the order in which things might have happened is rendered ambiguous.
In confounding the linear structure of reading, the photobook enacts the way in which memory emerges. Maya Deren notes that memory is “horizontal” in not being “committed to the natural chronology of experience. . . . Man can compare the beginning of a process to the end of it . . . he can compare similar portions of events widely disparate in time and place.”21 Deren's conceptualization of nonlinear temporality as “horizontal” finds resonance in the structure of the photobook. Not only does the book open and unfold horizontally, left to right or vice versa, without a fixed chronology, but the edit also mimics the reiterative elements of recollection, suggesting patterns through associations. As already discussed, the photobook begins and ends with consecutive photographs taken at two different locations, both of which are eventually shown to be emptied out of their human inhabitants. A balcony at home and an unidentified location, the protagonist of the book and an undifferentiated mass—there is no apparent relation between the spaces or the people featured in these images. Yet what connects them is their apotheosis of absence. Through the first and final image, the photobook's frame of recollection is hauntingly cyclical.
Time in Hasan's photobook also appears synchronic, both by design of the book as well as in the nature of some of the photographs. While the gatefolds operationalize the simultaneity of what is captured inside and outside them, the lack of page numbers, resisting narrative direction, suggests that the photographs may all be seen as inhabiting the same temporal plane. Another way in which the synchronic nature of the work can be mapped is within some of the photographs themselves. Inside two of the gatefolds is a spread consisting of two images that are, in fact, a blending together of several photographs.
In contrast to a uniform design of one photo per page, these compounded images bleed over the gatefolds. In the center of the image on the left, Hasan's parents recline on their bed as a blue-tinged image of the industrial plants blends around them (figs. 7a–b). This was not, however, intentional. Hasan explains that one of the cameras he used in those six months had a broken winding mechanism—so every time he took a picture, he “had to wind it afterwards to take another photograph.” As a result, “in between the space for two negatives, a third one got superimposed.”22 This image can thus be seen as emblematizing how “events narrated or portrayed in memory texts often telescope or merge into one another in the telling, so that a single recounted memory fuses together a series of possibly discrete events.”23 So far this essay has demonstrated that the photobook enacts modes of recollection by upsetting the assumption of linear time and narrative progression. But what is the text's relation with recollection? In other words, having seen that the photobook enacts the unfolding of memory, this gives us occasion to consider what it is that it recollects, and how does it do so.
There is a restless voraciousness implicit in the range of photographs that the photobook includes. From a filigree of light and shadow on the floor, to clothes drying on a verandah railing, to glass bottles floating in a gutter, they attest to an urge to capture everything—or, perhaps, to indecision about what ought to be photographed or why. While one could argue that these photographs are meant to convey the ordinariness of everyday life even amid extraordinary circumstances, many of these images appear aimless, particularly in the absence of any description or explanation. They seem to lack deliberation, as if they were taken in passing, at random, without much thought to framing, composition, or light.
Two examples will clarify this point. In the first, the curtains cover the entirety of the frame of the window (fig. 8a). The sunlight peers through, creating a filigree of shadows. The curtains blowing in the wind are captured from below in their ebb and flow, as if the photographer took the shot lying or sitting down. From this vantage point, one cannot see through the curtains. What lies outside the window remains out of view. The frame of the window and that of the photograph coincide, ironically, preventing the photograph from becoming a window to the world. In the second photograph, in contrast, the curtains are not entirely drawn (fig. 8b). One sees a street, a building, a few trees, and a signboard. They are in focus, whereas the interiors are blurry and the angle of framing is somewhat skewed. The photograph shows a profile view of a television playing on top of a white cabinet. It is positioned diagonally, leading one's eyes to the distant background, outside the window. The subject of this photograph, unlike the previous one, appears to be what lies beyond. Yet this part of the image is overexposed, with few of its features distinguishable. Like the previous photograph, here too the reader's vision is somewhat limited. It is difficult to ascribe these photographs any definite meaning within the narrative sequence. Perhaps they represent the caregivers’ distractions or wanderings when caught up in the limbo of terminal treatment, waiting for a forestalled and foretold future. For the readers, as it might have been for the family, a vision of what lies ahead, even at a near distance, is compromised.
Several more photographs are similarly elusive, for the photobook provides no captions or annotations. Leafing through the book, one finds very minimal text. Besides the title page, which reproduces the information on the cover, and the copyright page that appears at the end of the book, there are five short pieces of written text. These include an epigraph from Epicurus and a concluding passage from Rumi, each five or six lines long and taken from Mahmood's personal diary. A third extract appears anonymously. Brief bios of Hasan and Mahmood appear at the end of the book, after the epilogue. The book contains no other written material. The usual fixtures of a photobook—an introduction, a foreword, reviews, and even an artist's note—are conspicuously absent. The lack of captions appears particularly odd, since it is a collection of private photographs and most readers would not recognize the personal relations or contextual specificities. Without any immediate information about where and when each photo was taken or what one is to look at, it is difficult for readers to arrive at any conclusions about the circumstances the images depict.
Images in publications are often supplemented by the written word. In photobooks, galleries, reportage, or advertisements, the viewer expects to have a text that denotes what the photograph is. Linguistic messages distill the meaning of the otherwise polysemous image. As Barthes explained, “The caption helps me to choose the correct level of perception, permits me to focus not simply my gaze but also my understanding . . . the text directs the reader through the signifiers of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others. . . . It remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance”24 For Barthes, the written text appears to have almost a didactic and pedagogic function. The text “permits,” “directs,” and “controls” the perception of the image. It attunes us to what it is that we are looking at or what in the image we ought to look at. It instructs readers to focus on particular aspects of a photograph to ensure a “correct” interpretation that leads them to a foreclosed meaning. This regulates readers’ subjective experience of an image.
What, then, does the absence of the written word signify? Without a caption to anchor the photograph, the photobook allows the reader freedom to interpret what he or she sees. Take, for instance, the only nonfigural image that appears near the end of the book (fig. 9). It is a blend of colors without any borders or contours. The surface is almost entirely black, with tinges of blue and brown. Toward the center, a dispersion creates a triangular formation of colors that extends to the lower right corner. Shades of yellow and green transform into a red which merges with the dark negative space. It is not discernible whether the photograph was intended to be an abstract blend of hues or was an accidental result owing to expired film or faulty developing. But the fact that it is included in the book compels readers to look for its purpose in the narrative. Does one prioritize the darkness engulfing the light or the light piercing through the darkness? Does this image's appearance soon after the final photograph of Abba relate it to his death? If so, then is death seen as an escape from suffering into the light or as light being extinguished by an overwhelming shroud of dark? Or perhaps it signifies the very puzzlement that the reader experiences—the indeterminacy of the image materializing the inability to recollect except as abstractions? The photobook offers no definitive answer. It allows ambiguity to linger, denying fixity, indicating that for the reader making meaning may not ultimately be possible. With its meaning no longer readily legible, the image becomes opaque, inciting imagination.
This particular photograph, appearing as an indistinct glare, allows one to return to a consideration of the ethical force of Hasan's work. As an abstract dispersion of light, it brings to mind the specificity of the photograph—literally, light-writing—as a medium. The abstraction allows one to see a photograph not for its indexicality but for its material conditions. Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad notes that “the medium seems to belong to the sphere of opacity and materiality, and the image to that of immateriality and transparency. The medium is matter and image is imagination.”25 The indistinct glare emphasizes the cognitive work in viewing a photograph. Usually, we recognize an image not as an accumulation of imprints of light but as a referent to the thing itself such that “the opaque medium becomes a transparent conduit for its image.”26 The absolute mimetic nature of photographs, however, may be compromised in low-definition images where the medium becomes evidently conspicuous.27 Grønstad asserts that such apparently bad images, by exposing photography's material opacity, offer an alternative to an increasingly fetishized and commodified visual economy with its high-definition desire for clarity and transparency.28 Examining the works of Bill Nichols and Hito Steyerl, among those of others who have variously discussed the potential of the “poor image,” Grønstad notes an underlying “correlation between an aesthetics of opacity and ethics.”29 In thinking along with this tradition about the functions of opacity, the apparent defects and flaws in Hasan's photographs gain a productive ethical charge.
One of the most frequently recurring tropes of the photobook is its inclusion of indistinct photographs, what are commonly described as “noisy” or “bad” images, the kind that are usually discarded.30 Their presence in When Abba Was Ill is conspicuous right from the first photograph featured on the cover (fig. 10). The image is of a single stalk of a plant kept in a glass jar of water atop a table inside a room. A warm sepia tone washes over the scene, complementing the beige background of the book cover. At a glance, it makes the photograph look aged, as if it has yellowed and faded. The sunlight seeps through the window with alternate patches of light and shadow merging into the plant. The plant leans to a side and its shadow falls on the wall behind. While the photo is blurry and its objects hard to identify, the shadow shows that the leaves are somewhat wilted. The central focus on the drooping plant not only foreshadows imminent death but is also an invocation of a time when the leaves were fresh and bright. The image appears as if representing the bleary vision of someone with diminished eyesight. While it may be read as offering a glimpse of Abba's point of view, what could be the purpose of using it as the cover image to introduce us to a book that is narrated from the perspective of someone else?
The cover photo, with its misty appearance, presents an apt segue to a narrative of recollection. It indicates how the photographs that constitute the narrative overtly fail to replicate what the photographer actually saw at the moment of the shutter clicking. Instead, the photographs present a different and deferred form of that experience, a palimpsest of indexicality and errors developed through a technical photographic process. The examples of distorted images most potently approximate the way that one recollects. As Annette Kuhn explains, “The relationship between actual events and our memories of them is by no means mimetic; . . . memory never provides access to or represents the past ‘as it was’; . . . the past is always mediated—rewritten, revised—through memory.”31 Perhaps the same can be said of photographs’ relation to the past. What the camera sees is already regulated by the photographer. Hasan's work further emphasizes that the photograph is not only manually but also technologically mediated and transformed. With their materiality made conspicuous, the photographs’ mimetic force weakens. This weakening serves a key ethical function in disrupting the illusion of the photographs as offering a transparent and immediate access to the past. While photography's status as a proxy for memory is not entirely unsettled, readers are made to reckon with the fact that their access to the memory of the time when Abba was ill will always be contingent. The resolution of memory is recognized as irrevocably compromised. The photobook, even as it enacts remembering, reflects those memories in their states of decay.
In several photographs, the inability to see clearly what the photograph captured is also due to the point of view from which they were taken. In so many instances, the camera seems hesitant, waiting outside doors or behind curtains or observing from across a room. Whether it is of Hasan's brother at his prayers or Mahmood sleeping in the hospital, the view is often obstructed by intermediate objects that stand between the camera and the subject (figs. 11a–b). In one of his mother's portraits, she sits on the balcony, leaning against the railing, with her eyes directed upward (see fig. 12, image on right). Her face is out of focus and blurry, although it is evident that she is in a contemplative mood, not giving much attention to the hovering lens. A black patch covers the left edge of the photograph from top to bottom—a door frame or a curtain, perhaps, making the reader aware that they stand on a threshold, at a distance. It is at this moment of recognition of this boundary, it can be argued, that the photobook makes an ethical intervention in its readers’ encounter with the pain of others, compelling them to invert the attention from the subject to themselves. By being positioned at the threshold, Hasan's photographs keep the reader from getting close, denying the sort of gratification that the “false intimacy” of documentary close-ups promise in efforts to make the onlooker “feel” the pain of the protagonist.32 Identification at the moment of closeness is therefore refused. Instead, the camera strikes a balance between proximity and distance, careful not to intrude. Such distant views are akin to what Lucy Bowditch calls “partial invisibility,” offering another form of opacity.33
The partially invisible image “generated through a blur, abstraction, or reflection, reduces information . . . leaving some element invisible, latent, making room for a boundless space of imagination, eros, nostalgia, and ideas.”34 In considering a photograph she took of her father, Bowditch asserts that “with its slightly uncertain and undefined forms” the picture represents her “subjective imaginings” rather than any objective appearance of her father which “bears meaning [for her] in a psychological context.”35 Bowditch attributes to the material condition of the picture an affective potential: the fogginess of the photograph comes to best capture the various shades of how she knew her father. It is only in this private rumination on the image that her father reveals himself. Her impression of her father would remain elusive to the general viewer looking at the photograph she took, even if the image were sharp and clear. Its blurriness only emphasizes this fact. Hasan's photobook underscores this tension between the visible and the invisible, not only in the form of the image, but also in the camera's negotiation of its own position in relation to its subjects, frustrating the reader's assumption of being privy to the time when Abba was ill.
That is not to say that Hasan's work stands for an impersonal distance. In fact, the photograph adjacent to the portrait of Hasan's mother seated on the balcony offers a more proximate view of her. Here, she stands in the same spot with her head similarly tilted upward (fig. 12, image on left). At a glance, the reader is allowed a close encounter. Yet as the view shifts closer, the image becomes hazier, with Hasan's mother's face losing its definition. Read left to right, it is as if the camera needs to move back in the next photograph to get a clearer picture. This conflict between the desire for and resistance to closeness permeates the book. Inside another gatefold, two photographs appear taken at the same spot on the balcony. Hasan's mother leans down to hold her husband in an embrace from the side as she smiles toward the camera (fig. 13). Mahmood, sitting down, lets out a pallid half-smile at the gesture. The photographs are almost identical but for the difference in focus, zoom, and exposure, technical aspects that render the one on the left more out of focus than the one on the right. Putting these two photographs next to each other suggests a grasping at memory—an effort to revise what one remembers, the urge to re-view it more clearly than it initially appears.
While, in some instances, being positioned farther away from the subject results in a clearer view, photographs of Abba appear in and out of focus irrespective of the distance between him and the camera. At a glance, it seems that the photographs get hazier as his health declines. Yet this is not consistently the case. In a series of photographs, one first sees Abba lying on the hospital bed from a distance, his figure out of focus. By contrast, in the next image, the camera is much closer to him as he sits on a wheelchair, his head bowed down (fig. 14). There is hardly a difference in the resolution of the two images.
Whether close by or at a distance, one thus struggles to get a good look at his figure. His face is never quite visible. The expired film renders a grainy, low-resolution image. The image gives way to the medium. The flatness of the photo becomes apparent, rendering the image opaque. Viewing such a photograph may not allow one to remember people as one would have otherwise remembered them. In the counter-memory presented by the photograph, its noise strips the figure of its identity and pushes it to the cusp of abstraction. The figure of Abba disintegrates. It dissipates as if in a gesture of refusal of the image it had become.
Glimpses of the book's refusal of Abba's gradually declining condition can be found elsewhere too. In a photograph near the center of the book, Hasan's parents are seated on either end of a couch (fig. 15). Mahmood looks healthy, relaxed and engaged in reading a magazine, as does his wife. Neither of them seem to be aware of the lens being trained upon them. No sense of foreboding haunts this family portrait of routine conjugality and domesticity. It presents itself as an interlude, almost as if it is of a time before Abba was ill. Much like the momentary forgetting discussed earlier that the closing of the gatefolds enables, this photograph effaces the signs of infirmity and offers a distraction from the realities of suffering and despair that shrouded the life of the Hasans when Abba was ill. Perhaps the most conspicuous denial of what was to become of Abba happens in the title of the photobook—When Abba Was Ill. Three things characterize it. It suggests (a) a duration of time, (b) in the past, (c) marked by a specific condition—the six months in 2012 chronicling Abba's ailment. Naming the book after the past keeps readers wondering what time it is that they encounter in the book. It is evidently a time after Abba's illness, but does the book lead readers to a time after his passing? Is the deserted room in the final photograph a metaphor for a haunting emptiness that enfolds the lives of those who survive the dead? Or does it leave room for us to imagine the present as a time when Abba has recovered from his illness, with his absence in the final photograph marking a departure from the space of illness—simply out of sight, as he might have been in the first photograph of the bamboo tree?
Unlike in the photobooks of Clement, Khandola, or Calle, one never encounters the corpse or the postmortem rituals in Hasan's work. What happens after the time when Abba was ill remains elusive. In so frontally foregrounding the duration of Mahmood's illness in the title and eventually excluding his lifeless body, the photobook elides an apotheosis of death. While the epigraph and concluding passage directly mention death, the photographs only suggest it. The last one sees of Abba is a blurry image of his slipper-shod feet touching the ground as if he is about to get out of bed. It is a continuation of the first image within that gatefold where he is seen sitting on his bed as if about to step down and start walking (fig. 16). The final photograph of Abba is not an image of lifelessness but of vitality. It is in this image that the photobook suspends the memory of Abba's illness. Death appears but as an ellipsis.
Photographs of the dead, especially when taken and published by their kin within the art world, have in recent times invoked polarizing responses. Although not the sole subject of an entire photobook, perhaps the most controversial of such photographs have been those of Susan Sontag that were taken after her death by her lover Annie Leibovitz and published in a retrospective collection with an accompanying exhibition, both titled A Photographer's Life 1990–2005 (2006). Several reviewers of the exhibition were critical of Leibovitz.36 Sarah Karnasiewicz, for instance, condemned the photographer's “reckless candor” in which “swollen and scarred, lying prostrate in her bed, Sontag suffers mightily in front of Leibovitz's lens, a reality that is especially hard to reconcile when one remembers how preening and proud Sontag could be in life.”37 Even as the photographs are acknowledged as “bearing witness” to “a time of great pain,” Leibovitz is ultimately scorned for her assumed “betrayal” of Sontag's privacy and consent.38 Moreover, Karnasiewicz scoffs at the archive of Leibovitz's noncommercial, “gray and grainy” images, which include the Sontag photographs in question, as a self-indulgent exercise, a failed attempt to present herself as an artist.39 These, she asserts, should not have made “the journey from the shoebox to the white gallery walls” and should instead have been preserved for the photographer's “private consumption.”40 The charge against Leibovitz is thus both of aesthetic impetuousness and ethical indifference. Nevertheless, several others have commended the frankness of Leibovitz's portrayal. As Yianna Liatsos's insightful survey of such scholarship explains, the objection raised against Leibovitz brings forth the paradox inherent in photographing illness and death, “the impossibility of not testifying to that which has been witnessed; and the futility of ensuring that the visual representation will escape the objectification of its subject—the crux of Sontag's own dilemma in Regarding Pain of Others.”41 She concludes that the resolution to the paradox can come only from the viewer's response: “It is we who must decide how we will encounter these images—voyeuristically or as reciprocal witnesses.”42
This glimpse into the debates on Leibovitz's portraits of Sontag helps us understand both the anxieties and assurances that Hasan's work entails. It also leads us to recognize the merits of the strategies that When Abba Was Ill adopts. While questions about the ethical implications of a posthumous publication of a patient's experience with illness may never be definitively resolved, attending to the modes of representation may help us read such images more productively. As this article has demonstrated, When Abba Was Ill offers in its architecture and choice of photographs alternative ways of representing and encountering illness and death. Its deceptively simple make—being of small size, plain matte pages, and a lightweight, handheld nature, in contrast to the usually large-format, glossy, heavy weight of photobooks—affords the familiarity of a personal diary or album. Such resonances align well with the book's self-conscious recollection of a family coming to terms with cancer. Attuned to the charges of exhibitionism and voyeurism levied on such projects, the photobook shields the image of Abba's declining health within its gatefolds, preparing the readers to tread forward with care. With its gatefolds, missing page numbers, and nonchronological sequencing of images, the photobook enacts the patterns of remembrance such that the illusion of a linear narrative time is variously disrupted, foregrounding the challenges and ambiguities of such memory work for the reader. This is further reinforced by the sometimes distant, grainy, out-of-focus photographs which draw attention to its own materiality and disturb its indexicality, rendering the image opaque, thereby resisting definitive meaning-making and encouraging a more imaginative interpretation of what it is that the text recollects. When Abba Was Ill thus responds to the criticism against both the representation and reception of illness and death in photographic works. If the viewer is to be held responsible for a conscientious engagement with photographs of illness and death, then Hasan's photobook demonstrates how the medium, too, can play an enabling part in that process. In effect, the photobook fulfills its promise of recollecting the time when Abba was ill only by relentlessly prompting the readers to recognize the immensely contingent, precarious, and elusive nature of unfolding memory.
Notes
The Nazar Foundation has been at the forefront of promoting lens-based arts in India, establishing the country's first international exhibition, the Delhi Photo Festival, in 2011, which was followed by its forays into publishing photography monographs. Presently it focuses largely on supporting individuals and organizations in their artistic practices. For more, see “Nazar Home,” Nazar Foundation, https://www.nazarfoundation.org/ (accessed November 3, 2023).
“About,” Jaipur Literature Festival, https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/about.
Hasan, “Adil Hasan”; “‘When Abba Was Ill.’”
Sohrab Hura, “Sweet Life, Chapter One—Life Is Elsewhere,” Magnum Photos, https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/art/sohrab-hura-life-is-elsewhere (accessed November 3, 2023).
The article uses reader not merely because the object of discussion is a book, but also in keeping with Patricia Holland's distinction between “users” and “readers” of personal photographs. According to Holland, the former refers to individuals or groups with insider knowledge about the photographs, while the latter term refers to those who do not have the same insights and have to interpret the photographs: “Users of personal pictures have access to the world in which they make sense; readers must translate those private meanings into a more public realm” (“Sweet It Is to Scan,” 138). The reader can be thought of as the general viewer, and sometimes this article uses reader and viewer interchangeably.
“Illustration of Life,” Dewi Lewis Publishing, https://www.dewilewis.com/products/illustration-of-life (accessed December 2, 2023).
For more on the relation between orality and photographic narrative, see Langford, Suspended Conversations.
For a comprehensive list of works both supportive and critical of Leibovitz, see Liatsos, “Temporality and the Carer's Experience.”