You really need to see this photo, it’s touching.
The piece: An untitled photograph from the series “Friends and Their Friends”
The artist: Anoop Ray
Where: In the show “INDIA|Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art” at Asia Society Texas Center through July 29
Why: What can we really learn about a person, or a relationship, from viewing an intimate portrait? And what does it tell as about the photographer?
Those questions are one reason to consider “Friends and Their Friends,” a series that helped artist Anoop Ray win FotoFest’s inaugural Charles Jing Fellowship, which comes with a $20,000 prize.
Most of FotoFest 2018 ended months ago, but the longerrunning, multimedia show at Asia Society Texas Center provides a glimpse of the range of contemporary photography in a country whose artists largely missed the heyday of 20th-century documentary work. Ray is among a half-dozen artists featured there.
Now a teacher at the Indian Institute of Photography in Noida, Ray began a visual diary from portraits he’d taken of friends when he was a teenager in the quaint town in the Aravalli Hills. He moved at 18 to the large, cosmopolitan city of Delhi. The images on view from his “Friends and Their Friends” series date from 2010 to 2015, when he was in his early 20s.
His portraits capture his friends in situations that sometimes appear to be candid, sometimes not. Their expressions are not always easy to decipher. Sometimes they are on the street. Sometimes they are in bed. Some are kissing or clingy. Some are alone. None of them are named; although the wall text suggests that some of them were photographed more than once, as their lives changed.
Knowing nothing about any of them, the pair I’d most like to meet are the young women dripping wet, as if maybe they’ve just stepped under an awning during a rainstorm. They wear matching olive-drab T-shirts and have their mussed-up hair pulled back. Are they sisters, maybe even twins? Friends? Partners?
Whatever is going on, they both have a mischievous angle happening in their arched eyebrows that makes you feel like they might let you in on whatever they are laughing about, if they like you.
Ray writes that he sometimes doesn’t know how he feels about people until he takes their picture because that helps him to “understand their psyche” — as if a moment captured by a camera might somehow give him better judgment about who to hang out with.
“Ideally, I’d want no camera between me and my ‘Friends and Their Friends,’ ” he explains. “These images come from relationships, not observations.” He sees himself less as a voyeur than a participant, building “an endless flow of connections,” he writes. “Images can be made, relationships can’t.”