ABSTRACT
Sunil Janah's famine photography, which was also published in the Communist newspaper People's War, is the subject of Chapter 7. Janah, like Chittaprosad, withholds the full context of his subjects’ plight and, unlike other contemporary photographers, refuses to stage his subjects. The background provided to the viewer is limited by his use of tight framing, and the expressions of his subjects are not only despair but also anger, curiosity, and tenderness toward others in the frame. Avoiding the tendency toward exploitative images of famine victims, Janah's images are intimate while ambiguous about the subjects’ relation to the camera and to other figures in the frame. Janah's work complicates theorizations of photography as either exploitative or dialogical.
