New Delhi, Oct 18: From haunting images of the Bhopal gas tragedy and the nightmarish sight of a policeman carrying a severed human head to the picturesque landscapes of Himachal Pradesh and a group of young women in a playful mood during the monsoon, journalist Binoo K John’s new book captures the vast spectrum of news photography, chronicling the bloody and the beautiful with equal rigour over more than a century.
In All in a Flash: News Photography in India, published by Niyogi Books, John brings together news photographs that have become part of the nation’s visual memory, captured by some noted and a few unsung photographers.
Divided into five parts, the book explores the many aspects of news photography and how they have collectively shaped the understanding of the nation’s history and some of its landmark moments.
“In this book of news photography, I define news pictures as those shot by a photographer employed by a newspaper or a news agency. Photos of events that have an eternity to them, and photos that tell a story. Any picture can be a news picture because news cannot be denied or compartmentalised,” John writes in the book.
“A few stunning documentary photographs which fall in that hazy intersection between art and beauty and news have been used. Many photographs have been chosen for their beauty alone,” he adds.
The book opens, almost in keeping with journalism’s age-old adage, “if it bleeds, it leads”, with a chapter titled “The Dead and the Dying”, capturing events and their subsequent photographic documentation through the work of some of the most fearless photographers.
A photograph by Virendra Singh of The Indian Express, showing a policeman carrying a severed head after the 1993 blast at the Indian Youth Congress office in Delhi, leads the chapter and also features on the book’s cover.
“Virendra Singh at that moment became the epitome of a news photographer. He did not flee from the scene, like many other photographers in the history of this most difficult art. Another bomb could have gone off, who knows… It is the photographer’s calling: to unwaveringly stand his ground and freeze a moment of history. Fear, apprehension, anxiety are for lesser mortals,” John writes.
The chapter also refreshes memories of other notable events in Indian history, including the aftermath of the 1996 midair collision between Saudi Airlines and Kazakhstan Airlines in Charkhi Dadri, the Hashimpura massacre of 1987, and the Khalistan movement in Punjab in 1984.
Documenting another critical event in recent history, John dedicates a section of the chapter to the Covid-19 pandemic, featuring a photograph of an inconsolable migrant labourer on east Delhi’s Nizamuddin Bridge in May 2020, clicked by PTI’s Atul Yadav.
Holding a mobile phone to his ear, the man’s face came to represent the collective sorrow of millions of Indians as a hitherto unknown disease wreaked havoc across the globe. (PTI)