TOM PIETRASIK | Photographer

This photograph was taken in eastern Sri Lanka a month ago. The four students had all been on a hygiene awareness course and had emerged enthusiastic advocates of handwashing.

India celebrates Global Handwashing Day on October 27th. I will be following activities in the east Indian state of Jharkand on that day. In the meantime, I’m in West Bengal photographing the build up to the event and looking at attempts to improve the sanitary conditions of those people most vulnerable to water-borne infection.

I’ve been doing a little background reading on the shocking statistics that demonstrate the urgency of the situation. According to UNICEF more than 5,000 children under the age of 5 years die every day from diarrheal diseases. And acute respiratory infections account for the the deaths of 1.8 million children a year.

According to a report in the Lancet, the incidence of both diarrhea and acute respiratory infections can be significantly reduced by handwashing. The report estimates, for instance, that handwashing with soap could cut the rate of diarrheal infections by almost 50 percent. It is clear that we need to increase awareness of the importance of handwashing. This doesn’t mean that other issues can be ignored. Inadequate clean-water supplies, overcrowded living conditions, a lack of education, poor nutrition and insufficient investment in public healthcare all contribute to the deaths of millions of people every year.

But if the enthusiastic splashing of the students I met in Sri Lanka could be replicated elsewhere, we might have achieved a significant step towards reducing the appalling rate of child mortality.

In July I was commissioned to take photographs of artist Subodh Gupta for a profile that was published in last Saturday’s Review section of the London Times (see above).

In the past twelve months I have been approached by three publications: America’s Art&Auction, the German ART Magazine and now The Times to illustrate features on the theme of Indian contemporary art. This alone is some measure of the recent international recognition bestowed upon Indian artists including Gupta who I have now photographed on two occasions. You can see my story on Indian art curators, commissioned by Art&Auction, on my website here.

Those that know about art will appreciate the significance of Subodh Gupta and particularly his contribution to contemporary sculpture. Gupta was brought up, one of six children, to a railway-worker father in a north Indian village so his modest roots stand in stark contrast to the decadent lives of the investors that now flock to his shows. Given the scale of his success – and despite a propensity for wearing ostentatious glasses – I have been reassured to find Gupta a modest and unassuming man on the occasions we have met in his Gurgaon studio on the outskirts of Delhi. I can only assume that a childhood spent without wearing shoes and a long apprenticeship that included a stint as a newspaper illustrator together with five years acting in a regional theatre group have provided the artist a steady grounding.

It must however be unsettling traversing such dissonant worlds, particularly given that Gupta’s work is in part defined by the austere rudiments of Indian life and yet hangs on the walls of private galleries in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and London’s Piccadilly. Gupta’s most celebrated sculptures are constructed from common domestic items including the steel pots and pans that are a feature every Indian home. Of the kitchen-ware that forms the basis of his work, Gupta says,

“The poor, the middle class and the rich use it at home. In this country, how many people have the utensils but they starve because there is no food?”

This comment takes on a deeper resonance when you realise that Gupta’s work fetches such huge sums of money. Two versions of his Mind Shut Down, modeled on the human skull and constructed entirely of steel kitchen utensils recently sold for €1 million each. Of Gupta’s many wealthy patrons, François Pinault, who bought the artist’s Very Hungry God, is worth US$16.9 billion. It is a sorry commentary on our world to discover that Pinault’s fortune is greater than the entire annual wealth of Gupta’s home-state of Bihar (US$15.5 billion) with a population of 83 million people.

It would be entirely wrong of course to suggest that Gupta’s work helps us comprehend this injustice. But he is certainly one of those individuals whose life, work and success are framed by the disparity of our globalized economy.

When India’s high-profile politicians head into town, its difficult to ignore their presence. I was in Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu last week to photograph the lives of those affected by the 2004 Asian tsunami. As I drove into town, I noticed an abundance of Indian Tricolours lining the road. These soon gave way to huge rosettes also in the green, white and saffron of India’s national flag. Further on into Cuddalore and large hoardings began to appear bearing the likeness of political figures, many of whom I recognised as the dominant players in India’s ruling Congress Party. At the town’s main junction a couple of palatial arches had been erected, featuring yet more political portraits, this time adorned with tinsel.

Most prominent among the faces bearing down on Cuddalore’s citizens was P. Chidambaram, India’s Home Minister. There was Chidambaram dressed in a Western business suit reclining in a comfortable-looking leather armchair, Chidambaram in sunglasses with arms folded, looking purposefully towards the horizon and a full-length Chidambaram dressed in the south Indian veshti, striding staunchly toward the viewer.

I’ve no idea what the Anglified, Harvard educated Home Minister himself made of it all. Perhaps he’d have considered the display rather vulgar. Or maybe it roused a fond nostalgia for the days of his royal ancestry.

Every one of Cuddalore’s hoardings that featured Chidambaram presented an array other political luminaries who’s size and position within the display was a definite indicator of their status. Local Congress party workers were in there, consigned to the bottom-most fringes; acknowledged but also rather shunned. A portrait of Cuddalore Member of Parliament K.S. Alagiri, distinctly smaller than Chidambaram but significantly larger than anyone else, kept the Home Minister company. I spotted Nehru’s face a couple of times but was surprised not to notice Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s portrait more often. Most comforting was the ubiquitous presence of Sonia Gandhi, hovering deity-like above all else; no doubt there to keep a reassuring eye on proceedings.

Chidambaram was in Cuddalore to launch a student loans scheme intended to encourage poor families to send their children into further education. I’m entirely supportive of such initiatives but I’m certain I wasn’t the only one in Cuddalore last week who felt that the well-being of students was a rather secondary concern to those elected officials eager to exploit the situation for a bit of self-promotion. Of course we have our own more subtle – though no less cynical – displays of power and patronage in the West. Perhaps it is only the coarse honesty of India’s political class which makes their arrogance and ambition easier to identify.

I have been traveling this past month so I must apologise for neglecting my blog.

At the end of August I flew from Delhi to the Maldives where I had the pleasure of taking on a celebrity portrait assignment. The work was a success but beachside portraiture during the monsoon season presents its own unique challenges. I will write more about this episode once the photographs have been published in November.

From the turquoise ocean of the Maldives it was on to London and then to New York to see family and friends. In New York I was also able to catch up with the picture editors who commission the assignments that make my life in south Asia such a heady mix of pleasure and frustration.

I will return to Delhi refreshed and enthused in a couple of weeks time. But first I shall be heading to eastern Sri Lanka and then Tamil Nadu, south India. I will be photographing communities whose lives were affected by the tsunami of 2004. Among them will be the orphaned children whose lives I have been following for almost five years now. I will publish a selection of these photographs once the work is complete but several photographs from this ongoing series can already be seen on my website under the title Tsunami Lives.

This photograph was taken at the opening of a new university just outside Delhi last weekend. Beyond the red carpet, there were thankfully few other symbols to denote distinction among the guests. But it doesn’t take a great deal of searching to find loud pronouncements of status and social standing all over India.

From the prominently posted list of VVIPs who are exempt from security at the airport to my landlord’s enthusiastic and often superfluous planting of a purple rubber-stamp beneath all of his correspondence (“Dr. V.N. Khosla, B.Sc., M.B.B.S., D.P.H, M.D.”), displays of status in India represent more than an expression of power. Flaunting your stature provides very real benefits by smoothing out bureaucratic hurdles and exempting you from the scrutiny of others.

One of my neighbours is an elected member of the Haryana State Assembly. At the last count he had four cars, three of them hulking SUVs which by their very size are a statement of his political brawn. Along with a little flag-pole and two tannoys, one of the cars happens to be fitted with tinted windows. Apparently this mark of authority is not enough on its own but must be supplemented by a large and conspicuous sticker authorising use of the tinted glass. The subtext here is surely to dispel any lingering doubt as to the superiority of the vehicle’s occupant.

Last year I was provided a small taste of the kind of practical, day-to-day benefits afforded those who rank higher in Indian society than I do. Benefits that I’m sure my powerful neighbour has long-taken for granted.

It was while on a photographic assignment for UNDP in Maharashtra in western India that I employed a local taxi hire who’s normal duty was to ferry the District Collector around on official functions. As a consequence our car was fitted with a flashing amber light stored beneath the glove compartment. We had no excuse to use this beacon of authority on our road-trip but when approaching the many toll booths that lined our journey, it was without hesitation or doubt that the driver reached over towards my feet. Lifting the glowing light up from the floor, he plonked it on top of the dashboard. Combined with a gentle squeeze to the accelerator and a complementary blast of the horn, the effect was immediate and indisputable. The uniformed toll-guards – normally such harbingers of frustration – were transformed into an obsequious blur. Retreating into their booths, none was willing to put their job on the line simply to verify the legitimacy of our privilege.

At the time this photograph was taken, eight year-old Sangita was suffering from a fever after she and her family had spent over three weeks living beneath a yellow tarpaulin shelter. The family had lost their home in the 2007 monsoon floods and their crop of rice and sugar-cane had been destroyed by the rains that affected the lives of 38 million people across northern India. This photograph was commissioned by UNICEF and I was working alongside one of their relief teams who were distributing water-purification kits and providing medical treatment. Sangita’s temporary home was one of the more ridged structures in a collection of a dozen tarpaulin sheets strung out along a muddy embankment beside a flooded field. I am frequently shocked by the hardship that is suffered almost routinely by many rural Indians who have very little control over the destiny of their own lives. It is clear that until the benefits of India’s economic growth are distributed more fairly, millions of families like Sangita’s will continue to suffer unnecessary risk at the hands of disasters like the 2007 floods.

This family portrait was exhibited last year in London’s National Portrait Gallery as part of the 2008 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. The closing date for entry to the 2009 prize has just passed and I have submitted the four photographs featured at the bottom of this post.

There is always an element of luck in entering competitions, particularly when you consider that, in the case of last years Taylor Wessing Prize, the jury had to sift through over 5,000 prints.

As a photographer how do you identify which of your photographs is appropriate for submission to a competition? Most awards provide some guidance for prospective entrants. The National Portrait Gallery encourages photographers entering the Taylor Wessing Prize to,

…interpret ‘portrait’ in its widest sense of ‘photography concerned with portraying people with an emphasis on their identity as individuals.’

This advice is obviously intended to invite as broad a range of entries as possible. Indeed, of the four finalists in 2008, Tom Stoddart’s spontaneous and particularly unflattering portrait of Rupert Murdoch stood in stark contrast to an elaborate work by Lottie Davies which eventually won the prize. Her digitally constructed “Quints” featured a woman surrounded by five babies which was in fact one baby photographed five times over.

I welcome the idea of diversity of style and also the exciting prospect of seeing how differently individuals interpret the idea of a ‘portrait’. Others undoubtedly feel the same way because any exhibition that is bound by such a loose and popular theme always attracts a large audience. But I do wonder about the effect on the viewer’s ultimate understanding and interpretation of a photograph when it is hung beside so many unrelated images. I’m sure that my portrait of Sangita and her family would have been considered very differently had it been viewed for instance, in an exhibition highlighting the effect of climate change on people’s lives.

The detailed information I have quoted in italics above was submitted along with my photograph to the National Portrait Gallery but the caption that ran alongside the print in the exhibition was edited down to just a couple of sentences. In my mind this left too many questions unanswered. For some photographers this is exactly the effect they want. I can understand why those working at the art end of the photography spectrum might consider that caption information unnecessarily constrains a viewer’s interpretation of their work. And of course all good photography has the potential to elicit an emotional reaction that lies beyond explanation. But when an environmental portrait that directly raises an important and urgent subject is denied context or placed alongside work that has no relevance to it, surely good caption information is more important than ever.

Despite these issues, I was of course very pleased that my portrait of Sangita and her family was chosen for last years exhibition and as a result was seen by so many people. It is for this reason that I have submitted four photographs to this prestigious prize in 2009. Though each of these portraits was taken in an environment or situation that is of relevance to the sitter, I don’t feel that any of them presents quite as urgent a need for explanation as the scene which surrounded Sangita’s family. It is for this reason that the captions I submitted this year are much shorter than last time around. You can read the captions below each photograph. The Taylor Wessing Prize judges announce their decision at the end of this month.

I have always been struck by the contrasts that exist between India and Sri Lanka. Arriving for the first time in Colombo in 2003, I noticed that Sri Lankan rickshaw drivers read newspapers. This might sound a rather trivial detail but it is such a rare sight in India – particularly in the north – that it was obvious there had to be an explanation.

Jayati Ghosh’s column in the current edition of Frontline magazine sheds some light on just why it is that Sri Lankan rickshaw drivers read and their Indian counterparts don’t. Under the headline Services for all, Ghosh explains that all Sri Lankan children between the ages of 5-14 are taught in state schools. Apparently Sri Lanka has for decades banned private schools from teaching students of Classes 1-9. This means of course that all of society has an interest in sustaining the quality of the public education system. I do know that private schools exist in Sri Lanka and I’m sure there is a constituent among the privileged that would like to weaken the state system. But the value Sri Lanka places on public education explains why it can boast a literacy level of 90 percent while the population of her huge neighbour to the north languishes around the 60 percent mark.

Ghosh notes that in India,

“We are unwilling to shell out the money required to ensure that all children in the country get the kind of education that the children of our policymakers automatically receive.”

I would add to Ghosh’s policymakers, most of the Indian middle class and all of the upper class who have no immediate personal interest in the proper running of government schools. This is for the simple reason that they choose to send their children to private institutions instead. You can’t blame individuals for doing this in a country where, as Ghosh explains, the education budget allocates a paltry Rs.600 ($15) per student per year. It doesn’t take much to realise that this figure represents a huge loss of potential for India.

In a landmark ruling the Delhi High Court has decriminalised gay sex. This is the latest chapter in a long struggle by gay activists who rightly observe that Article 377 of the Indian constitution denies them basic human rights while legitimising discrimination and violence. The homophobic backlash has already begun with several commentators, among them India’s high-profile former-cabinet minister Lalu Prasad, condemning the High Court ruling.

There are several reasons for this gay victory but in my view HIV/AIDS and the disproportionate burden it places on gay men has been the most important. This may sound a paradox: surely a virus with such potentially devastating consequences could only undermine those unfortunate enough to be affected by it.

This would be true if HIV/AIDS affected only homosexual men. But HIV/AIDS is of course not confined to the gay community and can affect anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. So wider society has been forced – for the benefit of it’s own survival – to acknowledge that the health of gay men matters to everyone. This simple and entirely logical point was made to me by Siddarth Dube, author of Sex Lies and AIDS, while I was working on the subject with him two years ago.

Because homosexual men are particularly susceptible to infection by the HIV/AIDS virus, intervention programs have channeled resources towards gay-rights groups and provided them a platform from which to campaign. Gay networks have been established and there is now a sense of solidarity and cautious optimism among a group that was once despairing and fractured. I have observed the same process of politicisation at work among other HIV/AIDS-affected communities while photographing them across India.

It is important to understand that legal recognition has not been bestowed upon India’s gay community. The Delhi High Court ruling is the result of long and ongoing struggle by those who have been brave enough to identify themselves as gay in what continues to be a deeply conservative society. Most gay men in India – quite understandably – choose to remain silent about their sexuality. I discovered this fact while working alongside my good friend Dilip D’Souza who writes an enlightening account of India’s hidden gay community here.

One group within gay society that are more visible than any other are India’s transexuals. The photograph above was taken while I was documenting the “Third Sex” Aravanis of Tamil Nadu state earlier this year. A string of recent legal victories for Aravanis mirrors the achievements of the wider Indian homosexual community. I will post more photographs from this series on the lives of Aravanis soon.