New Delhi, Oct 18 (PTI) From haunting images of the Bhopal gas tragedy and the nightmarish sight of a policeman carrying a severed human head to the picturesque landscapes of Himachal Pradesh and a group of young women in a playful mood during the monsoon, journalist Binoo K John’s new book captures the vast spectrum of news photography, chronicling the bloody and the beautiful with equal rigour over more than a century.
In “All in a Flash: News Photography in India”, published by Niyogi Books, John brings together news photographs that have become part of the nation’s visual memory, captured by some noted and a few unsung photographers.
Divided into five parts, the book explores the many aspects of news photography and how they have collectively shaped the understanding of the nation’s history and some of its landmark moments.
“In this book of news photography, I define news pictures as those shot by a photographer employed by a newspaper or a news agency. Photos of events that have an eternity to them, and photos that tell a story. Any picture can be a news picture because news cannot be denied or compartmentalised,” John writes in the book.
“A few stunning documentary photographs which fall in that hazy intersection between art and beauty and news have been used. Many photographs have been chosen for their beauty alone,” he adds.
The book opens, almost in keeping with journalism’s age-old adage, “if it bleeds, it leads”, with a chapter titled “The Dead and the Dying”, capturing events and their subsequent photographic documentation through the work of some of the most fearless photographers.
A photograph by Virendra Singh of The Indian Express, showing a policeman carrying a severed head after the 1993 blast at the Indian Youth Congress office in Delhi, leads the chapter and also features on the book’s cover.
“Virendra Singh at that moment became the epitome of a news photographer. He did not flee from the scene, like many other photographers in the history of this most difficult art. Another bomb could have gone off, who knows… It is the photographer’s calling: to unwaveringly stand his ground and freeze a moment of history. Fear, apprehension, anxiety are for lesser mortals,” John writes.
The chapter also refreshes memories of other notable events in Indian history, including the aftermath of the 1996 midair collision between Saudi Airlines and Kazakhstan Airlines in Charkhi Dadri, the Hashimpura massacre of 1987, and the Khalistan movement in Punjab in 1984.
Documenting another critical event in recent history, John dedicates a section of the chapter to the Covid-19 pandemic, featuring a photograph of an inconsolable migrant labourer on east Delhi’s Nizamuddin Bridge in May 2020, clicked by PTI’s Atul Yadav.
Holding a mobile phone to his ear, the man’s face came to represent the collective sorrow of millions of Indians as a hitherto unknown disease wreaked havoc across the globe.
Photographs taken by Reuters’ Danish Siddiqui and Ritesh Shukla showed “many fires of hell” as large open spaces were turned into crematoriums to accommodate the countless dead.
If Raghu Rai’s photographs of mass burials after the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 chronicled a corporation’s callous indifference to human life, Prasanth Panjiar’s lens captured the brutality of caste violence that left 10 Dalits dead in Mainpuri in December 1981.
“Taj Mahal as a Newsy Monument Full of Its Own Light” shows the historic building as an essential pit stop for visiting statesmen and celebrities.
“It revisits the Taj Mahal as a site of sublime beauty and as a stage for celebrity and politics alike, from John Murray’s first-ever negatives of the monument to Princess Diana’s iconic visit,” the book’s blurb reads.
Apart from a photograph of a solitary Princess Diana in 1992 by Getty Images’ Anwar Hussein, the chapter includes Homai Vyarawalla’s photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1961; a photograph of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his now-wife, Lauren Sanchez, clicked by PTI’s Pawan Sharma in 2020; and one of then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru with US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959.
In “Access to Power”, John sifts through photographs captured by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Kulwant Roy and Sunil Janah from the pre-Independence era, including Mahatma Gandhi inaugurating the Kamala Nehru Memorial Hospital in 1941 and Jawaharlal Nehru with Abul Kalam Azad and Stafford Cripps in the same year.
The chapter depicts news photographers’ proximity to those who made news from the ramparts of power, including Morarji Desai, Indira Gandhi, P V Narsimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, and Narendra Modi.
The chapters “The Picturesque and Paradise” and “Portraiture and Photographing Women” shift the lens away from VIP newsmakers towards the more regular subjects, interspersed with images of celebrities and moments that have remained imprinted in Indian memory.
A photograph by PTI’s Arun Sharma shows a long queue of voters walking down a hill in Himachal Pradesh’s Tashigang, with the Himalayas in the background, to reach a remote polling booth during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The closing chapters bring together photographs spanning a range of subjects, contexts and periods — from a melanistic male leopard walking gracefully in 2015 to a dead tiger at the feet of Lord Curzon in 1902; and from politician Priyanka Gandhi stealing a few moments of rest under a tree in 2002 to her brother and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi amid a sea of people during his ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ in 2023.
The book, John writes, is “about images, their many meanings and how they shape our understanding of people and events”.
“Without all the pictures seen here, history would have been just so much guesswork. These photographs showed us everything: we know what happened, who was there, who was muscular and beautiful, how the Taj Mahal was seen more than a hundred years ago, what closeness to power means, who died and who lived to tell the tale. We feel like we were there,” he adds.
The book, priced at Rs 2,499, is available at online and offline stores. PTI MAH RB MG
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