Cameras Need Not Sleep: Dhruv Malhotra

Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, Koenig Books / The Shoestring Publisher, 2024

‘Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark’ is the first significant publication to focus on photographic and cinematic works from the 1960s to the present that use night as the starting point for their explorations.

A lavishly illustrated compendium, ‘Night Fever’ is committed to those lens-based practices that have found in the night the opportunity to rejoice and rebel, but also to seek rest, refuge and perhaps some revelation.

Collectively, these films and photo portfolios, as well as the newly commissioned essays and texts from an international and cross-generational group of scholars, critics and curators, stress that there is no single night. For a person, place or group, night’s threshold, its liminal edge, is ever-changing, dependent not only on the actual conditions of light and dark, but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment.

The films and photographs in ‘Night Fever’ assert that for each person, place or group the night happens differently, and can be suffused with a range of emotional and physical experiences – joy, ecstasy, pain, fear, anxiety, mystery, tedium, inertia, exhaustion, and peace.

Edited by Shanay Jhavari, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, London. Jhaveri was previously Associate Curator of International Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

David Campany contributes a short text ‘Cameras Need Not Sleep’ on Dhruv Malhotra’s series Sleepers and After Party.

DHRUV MALHOTRA: SLEEPERS AND AFTER PARTY

David Campany

When making night photographs, insomnia helps. Drift is punctuated by moments of lucid attention. Observing after dark, the allure and cheap mystery of low light gradually passes, and the eyes and the mind attune to the less obvious. Keep looking. Shadows begin to open up. What at first seemed dimly, seductively impenetrable now appears vivid and bright. Keep looking for weeks, months, years: night becomes no stranger than day, and no less so, either.

For eight years, Dhruv Malhotra photographed urban nights in India, eventually producing his After Dark Trilogy. It began with Noida Soliloquy (2007–2010). Noida was a fast-developing suburb of New Delhi – empty lots and construction sites, pylons and water towers, trees and odd public sculptures, low-lying shacks and highway flyovers, dirt tracks and concrete walls. Malhotra’s camera stared glassy-eyed, lifting scenes out of the darkness, through exposures often of many minutes. Everything looks just a little artificial, like theatre or a movie set, hyper-factual, yet fable-like.

Chance encounters led to a second series, Sleepers (2007–2013). To western audiences, sleeping outdoors means “sleeping rough” and “homelessness”. In India, outdoor sleeping is as likely an escape from the heat of an uncooled bedroom, or a furtive nap taken on his night shift by a security guard. Malhotra made no contact with the people at rest, with whom he somewhat identified. By his own admission, he was directionless at the time. He would hang back, keeping his frame wide to show the setting. The images are not portraits, nor are the sleepers deep enough into the picture to be mere figures in the landscape. The distance is of respect and curious contemplation. Malhotra was making no political or social point. His intention, he has stated, was “not to comment on poverty; rather … to look at the sleeping figure in a particular context – the urban environment.” It is a picturing of complex situations. Good photography, compelling photography, can come from mixed feelings, and lead to them too.

Next came the even more theatrical After Party (2009–2015), a suite of photographs made all over India in temporary outdoor-event spaces. Dining chairs swagged in fabric and ribbon, carpets of artificial grass, empty platforms for speeches, backdrops of bright curtain, floors strewn with trash, all bathed in an acrid, eye-watering, artificial light. The revellers are gone, and dawn is breaking in the skies. Workers and security guards catch some sleep before the sets must be cleared away.

Whatever else they are about, these images are about photography: how it transforms what it documents; how camera vision is unlike eyesight, but related to it; how photographic time is not quite human time. But it is estrangement that makes these night scenes thinkable. In some ways, Malhotra has returned documentary photography to its surrealist roots of the 1920s. Before it was tamed and standardized by the mass media, documentary was understood to be experimental. Realism requires risk, not convention. Pictorial form is not a given; it must be discovered, in the midst of provisional experience in a changing world, which is without certainties.