Mayank Austen Soofi aka thedelhiwalla is a writer, blogger and a photojournalist. He has worked for Outlook, Hindustan Times and the Mint Lounge. He has authored four guidebooks on Delhi and one non-fiction book. His work revolves around Delhi, its lives and claims to present a Delhi that is usually forgotten or remains unseen.
There are a couple of problems with the kind of work Mayank chooses to do. He tries to encapture the life of Delhi that thrives and survives on the streets of the city. What is discomforting is how these pictures are so obviously not coming from the streets, they are just of the streets. Mayank’s lens comes off as a distant observer’s which fails to see its subjects as something more than the obvious. What makes it worse is how the conversations he produces are of the people on the streets of Delhi but these same people are never invited to be an active member or participant of these conversations. An appropriation of street culture seems to be taking its own life in his work since there seems very little or no narrative agency being given to the subjects of his work. What I am definite of is that this makes these conversations uncredible and hence, unreliable since the original narratives of the subjects are missing from the conversation. I wonder if the absence of narrative agency in the conversation and the overwhelming presence of an almost exclusively elite, urban, upper class audience which appreciates and celebrates his work does not make the entire act an act of scopophilia.
Apart from the fact that it’s unclear whether Mayank is seeking consent for all his photographs, there are a couple of other things that make this entire chamber of artistic expression seem a little eerie.
Mayank’s online feeds usually have a dominant theme revolving around the lives of the deprived. While it is easy to understand that happens because he tends to work a lot around areas like Nizamuddin Basti, Paharganj and Purani Dilli, what seems a little discomforting to me is that usually there is very little context to these pictures. What, then, remains to be considered a spectacle? The subject’s position of destitution. What makes this freakish is the way his images hold the power to objectify and isolate his subjects in order to calm the conscience of his privileged audience. Mayank’s constant production and recycling of poverty porn makes me question whether he deserves to be celebrated the way he is being celebrated and if to that extent.
Another running theme in his work is the obviously Muslim subject. It is fair to assume that is a result of his constant interaction with the area of Nizamuddin and the simultaneous development of a personal network. If you look at his work surrounding Muslim individuals and families, you would see that they are almost always clicked when they are engaged in an activity that can easily be identified as “something muslim”. What I noticed in most these images was how the muslim subject always ended up looking like a passive subject which, then, also made the images seem intrusive and personal (which incidentally bring us back to the argument of scopophilic photography). The frames and the treatment Mayank chooses does end up isolating the muslim subject into Muslimness.
Thedelhiwalla has a very joyful, enchanted way of looking at this city and its people which does the job of safely distancing his audience into passivity, immobilizing them from moving beyond primary consumption of the obvious.
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