ALL THAT REMAINS: Photography in the Time of Extraction
Sria Chatterjee
I
A Bitumen Glow
A blue and pink smog suffuses the surface of a photograph, filling it to its surface limits with an atmospheric haze, a bitumen glow. Part of a series of photographs taken in Narayankuri, it documents India’s first mine. Once underground, the photographs capture what is now an open pit mine, part of the larger Raniganj Coalfield. In Sarker Protick’s photographs, the harsh headlights of the earth-moving equipment and trucks, softened by the smoggy glow of night, afford fuzzy glimpses into a rubbly landscape. Slag heaps rise from the ground in smoky silhouette in some photographs. In others, mining machinery take center stage, leaking light and spreading dust as they stand ungainly yet fixed in their natural habitat.
If there is an ethereal sublime that the photographs evince, it is a reminder of the materiality of bitumen. When hot, the air above asphalt surfaces changes density, causing light to refract. Slurred into the dust and gas clouds of open-pit mines, the stillness of the night in which shift work continues is reflected in pools of stagnant coal water, moonlike. Coal mining in this province began as early as 1774, but when several British agency firms collapsed in the economic crisis of the 1830s, Bengali entrepreneur Dwarkanath Tagore (famously the grandfather of the poet/reformer Rabindranath Tagore), joined forces with the British indigo broker William Carr to purchase various mines and open new ones in the region.
The fuzziness of Protick’s Narayankuri photographs is not about light, heat, and dust alone. It speaks to the blurred histories of colonialism, capitalism, and elite Bengali nationalism. A zamindar (landowner) and early Indian capitalist, Tagore understood logistics well and wanted to control as much of the production, processing, shipping, and marketing infrastructures as possible. Taking a lead from the British agency houses that integrated their interests in plantations, factories, and trade in indigo and sugar, he used his ancestral estates, such as those in Berhampore for the indigo, sugar, and silk exported by his firm, Carr, Tagore and Company. Radical free thinkers of the Young Bengal movement idolized Dwarakanath for his initiative and the promise of an indigenous industry that would wrest the power of capitalist production and global consumption from European hands, disproving the environmental racist characterization of Hindus as idle and ignorant.
And yet, what did Tagore’s investments in the global exchange of commodities from coal to opium mean for the people of Bengal, for the Adivasi Santhals and Bauris who worked the mines in Raniganj and Chinakuri, or the violence of the opium wars unleashed in East Asia? Protick’s Narayankuri photographs run the risk of aestheticizing an extractive sublime, but the research-led thoroughness of the project makes visible the material conditions that undergird the histories of resource extraction, production, consumption, and markets. It shows how what Deborah Cowen calls logistics space (constituted by flows of infrastructures, information, goods, and people) formed the basis of imperial space in Dwarkanath’s time. The roots of the contemporary logistics space or the “pipeline” lie in the reorganizing of space and connectivity that formed a core project of the colonial enterprise. This has been carried on faithfully by contemporary capitalism (which, as Cowen observes, resonates so clearly with the supply line of the colonial frontier).
II
Awngar/Ahonkar
Railways, the harbinger of modernity and mobility that enabled Dwarkanath’s coal mines to break even and succeed run as a subtext through Protick’s Awngar, making clear that the cinders burning in the coalfields of contemporary Dhanbad or Asansol are not separate from their longer messy histories of colonial capital. Protick’s productive obsession with the passage of time across all his work comes through particularly powerfully in this project. In this series, a photograph taken in present-day Chinakuri lays bare the ribs of the earth through a disused railway track. Wood and steel warp agape, bringing into focus the indivisible processes of industrial production and decay. It is decaying wood and plant matter after all that produces coal, compacted by heat and pressure over millions of years. Overgrown and wild, the train tracks in all the photographs in this series lead nowhere.
There is an antiquarian quality in this series of photographs, in its pale long exposures and light-gray tones of black and white. What Protick seeks to capture is not simply the passage of time. His ruins are cloaked gently, and not without a hint of irony, in what I call the postindustrial picturesque. A literary and visual aesthetic which developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century in imperial Britain, “the picturesque” sought to capture “that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.” When British artists, antiquarians, and surveyors traveled to the colonies, they softened/erased out of their pictures the “natives,” the too-exotic, as well as poverty, violence, and the large-scale industrial projects of empire. In India, a particular fascination with ancient ruins in dense, overgrown foliage, in states of abandoned and rugged beauty formed the core of the picturesque aesthetic (fig. 1). It fed into a larger colonial aesthetic construction in which ancient India (synonymous with Aryan “purity”) was seen as the high point of Indian civilization, with anything coming after it tinged with progressive decline.
The domains of aesthetic theory, philology, racial theory, geology, industry, and the flow of capital bled into each other. Members of the Asiatic Society such as James Prinsep were keenly interested in geology, fossils, and archaeological and philological studies of India’s ancient past. His brother William Prinsep, an amateur painter of picturesque landscapes, worked with Dwarkanath Tagore at Carr, Tagore and Company. Landscape painting as a means of knowing colonial lands gave way to photography, which was quickly and extensively adopted by geological survey projects. In fact, army official and photographer James Waterhouse was tasked with consolidating the territories of the British East India Company through photographs. He ran the Photo-Litho Office of the Survey of India and took on in-depth studies of photo-mechanical printing for topographical and survey purposes, including several processes that used bitumen. The Geological Survey of India was established in 1851 and its primary objective was to identify and extract coal and other mineral resources across India, though central India became a major focus. The search for minerals not only relied on photography, but as Pratik Chakrabarti has shown, kick-started ethnological and paleontological speculations which sustained complex interdisciplinary investigations within the mining enterprises.
Protick’s photographs capture the ruins of late capitalism. Mining was one of the earliest ventures that disrupted the night and changed the nature of work, with its continuous cycle of eight-hour shifts “eroding,” as Jonathan Crary puts it, “forms of community and political expression.” The market now never sleeps. Awngar are the embers that are left behind but still burning. Protick’s photographs are taken at a time when the Indian government has started to privatize their mining ventures, and many mines are owned by business conglomerates such as Tata and Adani.
The wistful landscapes of decline and loss that Protick captures are by no means a marker of a phasing out of fossil fuels, a slow movement towards a just transition. They are instead a story of an altered Earth changing (powerful) hands. They are also about loss: a complex, messy sense of loss, of communities that have been displaced, mining towns built on precarious conditions that have boomed, busted, and moved as patterns of mining have changed. The exploitation of labor, especially tribal labor, continues, but the sense of loss lies not simply in the fact of exploitation, but in the erratic ways in which communities are moved and exploited, their small wins, employment, and livelihoods taken away as accidents happen and mines close, change hands, or move.
Protick’s photographs are not nostalgic. And yet each one is about time: deep geologic time, colonial, capitalist time, awngar (cinder) time, ahonkari (arrogant) time. Just as the alteration of the Earth is an ongoing process, Protick’s project too is unfinished. It is a persistent, ongoing attempt at making sense of the arrogance and audacity of a few to imagine an altered Earth, to reconstitute and reorganize human life and labor.
III
Heat & Pressure
Over centuries, heat and pressure work to force oxygen and hydrogen out of the soil, leaving carbon-rich deposits—coal—in layers known as seams. As moisture is squeezed out, these deposits compress further, their carbon content rising. Close-up vertical photos of open-pit mines in Asansol and Dhanbad are accompanied by sweeping views of the coalscape eroded, burning, heaped, and waterlogged. The faded antiquarian aesthetic is quickly lost as we move closer to the skin of the Earth.
In all of these photographs, we sense the heat and pressure on the land, centuries of compression, cracked open with dynamite, moved in swathes, with shattering force by earth-moving equipment. In one photograph, we enter a mine, the hollowed silent blackness offset by photographs beside it. In another, the surface of the land burns with an orange glow through large cracks of rock. Visually arresting, these photographs too flirt with the sublime. They abstract visual form and transform them into arresting, aesthetic images. What happens when we put Protick’s photographs under pressure?
One of the first questions I asked Protick when we first spoke about his photographs was about the conspicuous absence of human beings in his photographs. In one photograph, we catch a glimpse of a woman monumentally dwarfed by the burning sands and coal spoil around her, racing downhill. What comes through here is the scale of the mine and how insignificant human figures are in it. Protick spoke to me about structures of illegal trading of coal orchestrated by local mafia, which sustains some of the families who live around coalfields. It is an open secret with the authorities, but identifying faces would be a violation of their safety. It is not a very peopled landscape anymore, anyway. Workers, when you see them, are machine operators or security personnel.
It was a choice not to photograph miners, gather testimonies, juxtapose people and land, or do, for instance, what American artist LaToya Ruby Frazier does strikingly in her project And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise (2016). It is also both quite like and quite unlike American photographer and writer Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1989–95), which integrates text and image to provide a critical documentary of economic catastrophe and the materiality of oil in relation to corporations and governments prioritizing profit over people and ecosystems.
It is a tricky business making photographs speak. And Protick makes his photographs do a lot of work. Awngar makes the connections clearly—between extractivism and colonial and capitalist histories, between railways, mobility, flows of minerals, materials, and people, an abstracted logistics space, structures that dwarf and swallow those that work on mines—but does so visually.
IV
Steel
A further series of photographs ostensibly of the Hardinge Bridge over the Padma River in what is now Bangladesh produces, in my view, a visual clarification of Protick’s position (fig. p. #). Breaking from the pale long exposure, antiquarian views, and the direct, heavy, arresting images of the coalfield, what we are presented with in this series is structures. The structures are abstracted, silhouetted, and thoroughly over the top. Named after Lord Hardinge, the bridge is a steel railway truss bridge that was constructed between 1910 and 1915 in colonial India. The bridge is a testament to colonial feats of engineering, the use of steel (an alloy of iron and carbon, for which metallurgical coal is an essential ingredient), the mobility that railways ensured (of migrant workers in central and eastern India, of surveyors, archeologists, scholars, minerals, goods), of brutal histories of the partition of Bengal, of the river it rests on, another site of ecological devastation and leaky logistics space. Hardinge Bridge connects. This series with its thick, crisscrossing lines and filigrees of steel stand testament not simply to a railway bridge, but to the sheer weight of invisible structures that underlie the long histories and material conditions of global exchange and extraction.
V
Relics
In the last series, Protick focuses on objects as ruins. The typewriter, corroded and silent, is a relic of the administration of extraction. In another photograph wires spill out, exposed. As processes of communication and industrial excavation change, what happens to the things that get left behind? A meditation on loss, planned and unplanned obsolescence, these relics come into their own as objects and characters in a story in which the dehumanization of work and workers endures. The abandoned mine too is a relic, posing a constant threat to those who live around it.
An ongoing project, Awngar is ultimately about those embers that keep burning in the ground. It is not a departure from but a commentary on ongoingness and the structures of capital and political reorganization that dwarf and cripple. Photography and capitalism operate on a “shared logic of abstraction, alienation, and the conversion of use value into exchange value” and these photographs don’t aim to be an exception. Even as Protick plays with the picturesque, sticking himself within a longer history of photography as a tool of imperial surveys, of constructions of race and ethnology, he is aware of the potential of pathos. For all its intensity and glances outwards to the material and political conditions of extraction, the photographs simmer with a woundedness that speaks for the landscape and its moving populations.
Sria Chatterjee is an art historian and an environmental humanities scholar. She is Head of Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, where she currently directs the Climate & Colonialism research project.