Christopher Pinney is a professor of anthropology and visual culture at University College London and has occasionally worked as an art historian as well. The Padma Shri recipient has spent more than two decades in India, working on a number of projects, notably with photographs obtained from factory workers of the Maluwa region in central India. Pinney is currently in Kathmandu as a guest/participant for Photo Kathmandu 2016. Nhooja Tuladhar caught up with the visual anthropologist to talk about his body of work and his involvement with Photo Kathmandu. Excerpts:

As a visual anthologist, you take images and talk to people about them. Tell us a little about how you approach ethnographic research.

The most rewarding data are ones acquired from people you know very well. I have been going to the same villages and towns (in India) since 1982; there are many people who I can ask about almost anything. So, if I see that they have got an interesting image on their phone, it’s not a problem to say, ‘Oh that looks great! Let me see it…I want a copy of it.’

But if you are out somewhere different, and you see an astonishing image, it may be difficult getting access to the image.

But as long as people don’t feel that you have ulterior motives in asking them about a particular image, then they are usually happy to share the image and tell you absolutely everything they know about it. But, that takes years of fieldwork and practice.

So, there’s always a balance between these two sides in ethnography; each side has to interest the other.

Tell us about your work in India.

I started off working on photographs owned by factory workers in Maluwa region in India. I was attracted to this part of Maluwa; they had a very large, continuous synthetic textile production factory employing about 20,000 people. And a large part of the workforce was sourced from local villages. So, I had already decided that I wanted to live in a village where many workers were going to a nearby factory, so it was perfect for the purpose.

I went in with one agenda and I discovered that there were other things happening in this region that drew me; that I found were more interesting.

So, future fieldwork focused on that. Initially, I ran back and worked on popular photography; that was working on village-level, looking at what people had in small albums, sometimes just in plastic bags or tucked away here and there. I was trying to see what role photography played in largely impoverished villages. For instance, what roles did photos play in memorial rituals. But also more broadly, what happens when people start to accumulate photographs.

Why do you think it is important to write about an image, or a photograph, to be specific? Why do you do it?

Well, I think images on their own generally say too many contradicting things to be useful. So writing about them is a way of narrowing the range of meanings that might be put on them. For images to have their full power, they need to work with words. It is not that images need the words to give them power; it is almost as though the images have too much power and unless you channel the viewer in a certain way, it is not necessarily going to be a productive encounter.

I often go to lectures where someone will have an initial slide on the screen and I’ll have absolutely no idea what it is or what I should think about it. And in the end of the lecture, I could give an hour lecture about that image, you know, it has completely changed the image for me because I have understood what’s happening in it. So, the image, I think, is always the starting point for that enormous panorama of additional information and engagement.

Writing about photographs is not an established practice in Nepal. How do you think the art form could be brought into practice? And what kind of an approach do you think should younger writers take up?

I don’t think there can be just one approach. The best way to learn is to read what other people have written about photography. And I mean, read a range of approaches. So, one of the things that we tried to do in the course [last year’s workshop] is we didn’t just look at great examples of photographic writing but tried to look at a spread of approaches in writing so that people can think, ‘Yeah, I like this or I don’t like that.’ Everyone ultimately has to find their own style. But I think, central to that is reading other people.

Moreover, you would need training which immerses you in writing about photography, the arts, philosophy or culture. There is a lot to learn and it’s little bits of all  those fields that are going to be potentially relevant and any successfully written account of photography is going to have to draw from all that.

Do you think a piece of writing about a photograph helps the photographer?

It certainly does. I often get asked to write catalogue essays or small pieces for exhibitions of photographers and it matters to me that when they read it, and think: ‘Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. That illuminates my work to me.’ This does happen. But when that doesn’t happen and when you just get silence, or when they say that they haven’t really understood it, of course, the critic is very disappointed. But as an outsider, coming from a different viewpoint, discipline and a different set of readings in your head and a different set of experiences, you can offer something to the artist that allows him to say: ‘Yeah, there’s something happening here.’

Tell us about your experiences from the two editions of Photo Kathmandu.

I think, memorably, both the editions of the festival were public in nature. Obviously, it is due to the fact that Patan is this magical space—it’s as if someone already built it as an art gallery. You have more or less the perfect climate. The space allows for the public to engage with these works and I think that’s the most amazing thing about Photo Kathmandu.

When I have had spare time, I have spent three-quarters of an hour sitting opposite the road where the show Afghan Dream (Sandra Calligaro, France) was. I’ve looked at the show and then sat across the road and just watched the public going in and looking at it. About 15 people on motorcycles screeched to a halt, and went in to see it. So the sense you get there is that this isn’t just for the cultural elite.

If you were an artist showing your work like that, you wouldn’t want anything more than that.

What, in your opinion, would be the next step for the festival?

Obviously, it is going on to a biennial cycle, which makes sense, I think. I find it hard to suggest anything, but there might be a possibility to create a new scheme: for instance, for there to be a daily newspaper where a group of students who’ve taken writing photography courses would produce commentary on the previous day’s events and all exhibitions. A little bit of that is happening on social networks but that could be developed further. You know, it is always great for young writers to see their words in print, to have a tangible material trace of their hard-work.

Do you have any plans on basing your research in Nepal?

Yes. I am partly here to gather more information, especially from Bhaktapur, on the possibility of coming back later for some fieldwork on local studios. I am trying to find out more about Nepali (photo) studios. So, that is looking at the popular end of the vernacular activities. It crosses over very well with the kind of archival holdings of the Nepal Picture Library.

And this could be a chance to work with half-a-dozen younger scholars and build upon their writing and analytical skills. So maybe there will be scope for a collaborative book to come out of that archival and ethnographic field research.