A New Indian Picture:

Reforming The E-Topographics

Soham Joshi April 2023-Present

 Preface

David Company writes, “Photography is selection, quotation, citation. The

gap between one’s own photographs and those around us can be very small.
With the camera, any camera, a portion of the world can be selected;
photographs can be included within in one’s own photographs; one can make a
photograph as if it were an already existing image; or one can repurpose an
already existing image.”

In terms of how one perceives it, our sense of the landscape has always
been individual. Photographers and artists have always challenged what a
'landscape' is and how it can be depicted and explored. Photographers like
Ansel Adams and the f64 group aimed to find depth and detail in the
landscape and nature while Alfred Stieglitz and the Pictorialists tried to
put photography on the stage with other artforms by creating picturesque
images of their environment. The New Topographics style in photography,
which came after the Pictorialist and Realist periods, portrayed the impact
of urbanization on the American landscape.
This urban landscape shifted online after people started discovering what
it was like to imitate real-world settings in artificial spaces they could
reach with internet-enabled devices. With the invention of the Google
Street View, anyone could take a stroll of any neighborhood without setting
foot outside their personal space. Artists were hence opened to a
completely new way of traversing landscapes and making images of this ‘e-
topography’.

Artists like Doug Rickard, Mishka Henner, Michael Wolf, and John Rafman
reacted to this change by using Google Street View to roam around urban and
suburban locations and captured the images as screenshots or digital camera
images of the screen. Much like traditional photography, this process
immortalizes the documented places and people against the ever-changing
pace of the world.
 Artist Statement
With pressure growing on people moving into an ever-repopulating city,
there seems to be a tension between the aesthetics of urban architecture
and how it emotionally and mentally affects humans. Pune, like all cities,
fell subjected to urban decay. Parts of the old Pune began to experience a
change in pace as a result of the council pushing development in the region
around it. Roads that were usually deserted in the late afternoons were no
longer popular places for locals to stroll and engage in quiet
conversation. People appeared to be struggling to maintain the sense of
community that this city has traditionally enjoyed. Being exposed to these
changes while growing up inspired me to develop this work.
In the ongoing "A New Indian Picture" series, I look for an interlude in
the daily routine of people's lives. The roaming car camera provokes this
moment as people can occasionally be seen turning to observe it, but
Google's software blurs their faces and conceals their identities. Using
Google Street View, I took photographs of the areas where I grew up,
liberating their residents and geographic landscape from the passage of
time. The imagery explores how to navigate a city and what it means when we
try to capture public and private locations that we would otherwise be
unable to access or recognise.