The Mystic Sign

Shapoor Nusserwanjee Bhedwar 
“The Mystic Sign” 
From Album “Art Studies”, c.1890 
Carbon print

 

There are some very special photographs, like this one that I was lucky enough to find in a splendid book I recently bought: “Photography in India – A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present”.

The book is remarkable and complete, 300 pages that explain how Photography arrived in India and all its major exponents.

It must be said that India, as a British colony, the “jewel in the crown”, was among the first countries that became aware of Photography, just a few months after its invention. Because it was used as one of the way of colonialization project of the Europeans in the various Asian countries, and the Indian sub-continent.

Thus it was, thanks to the sultans and kings who exercised their power for the dominant countries, that China, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, knew this new way of expression, especially with the “pictorialist” movement that ferried painting towards the modern invention of Daguerre and Talbot.

I believe that the enormous influence that Felice Beato had, thanks to his uninterrupted travel to Asian countries, teaching the art of pictorialism, should always be remembered.

 

However, this is not what I want to tell you about.

Instead of this photo of Shapoor Nusserwanjee Bhedwar, born in 1858 to a wealthy Parsi family from Bombay, where he studied art and literature.

Also interested in the theater, he approached photography in 1888 to illustrate his own texts. He studied at the London Polytechnic School of Photography and soon became famous in Europe and India, winning several awards.

He also, like many at the time, embraced the idea of pictorialism, which saw photography as more than a simple representation of reality. Rather as an art form, not far from painting, with which to narrate in a dramatic and theatrical form.

 

This photograph is titled “The Mystical Sign”, and it is from 1890.

I think rarely was a title ever more successful.

The first time I saw it I jumped in my chair.

Okay, who knows what that man is doing in front of the group of women who admire him. However, at first glance I think that each of us has thought of that “mystical sign” that has become a brand of our century, an anthropological icon of our modernity: shooting with the phone.

It's really funny, and certainly many of you, reading with all your rationality, are thinking that it doesn't make any sense, that this man is doing something else.

Of course, smartphones certainly didn't exist at that time.

But, every now and then, we also have to see the world and images with children eyes, right? Otherwise what a bore...

So leave your brain under the pillow, as someone wisely said, and enjoy the smiling and attentive pose of the women gathered in a group in front of this rich noble, with their hands in the perfect gesture that we see every day of our life. Don't take a photograph with his camera but with his phone.

Immersed in that beautiful black and white carbon print.

 

Penang. MALAYSIA, 2019

Dear Shapoor Bhedwar would never have imagined that that sign would truly become “mystical”, because as has been said for years now, the image has filled the void left by religions for many of human beings.

Narcissus needs to look for himself on the water mirror because the sky is now empty of meaning.

To the mysticism of the saints we have come to the mysticism of images, but not the iconic religious ones, but rather the daily ones of ourselves multiplied to infinity as the only form of (earthly) immortality.

 

Let's enjoy, then, like amazed children, the curious time bubble of this image. A joke, of course, an illusion – a prodrome.

 

Mysticism and rationality never got along, after all.

 

• Socrates and Photography 
• Rhymes and Assonances: Two Photographers At the Mirror 

“Photography in India – A Visual History from the 1850s to the Present”,  Nathaniel Gaskell and Diva Gujral (Prestel, 2018)

 

Italian version