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Talk on "Making Cultural Archives MeaningfuTat IGNCA

Kavita, New Delhi
Housed in an imposing building in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi is The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA). Recently, the government-funded arts organisation hosted a talk on "Making Cutural Archives Meaningful: Why and How". The speaker: former academic-turned- media professional Pratik Joshi.
The layperson would be forgiven for giving what sounded a sleepinducing event a go by. But when one eventually made it to the talk, it was an afternoon well spent. Joshi peppered his talk with so many examples of successful archiving that attention did not pall. To start with Joshi distinguished libraries and museums from archives. "Archives are repositories of expressive traditions in the form of sound, photographs, video, audio, literary and oral traditions," he said.
Pointing out that archives should not be regarded as sacrosanct and out of the reach of the layperson, he made the point that “Archives should be available to people who are sincere." When it came to oral traditions, he said that hundreds of languages are being lost the world over and were therefore in need of careful preservation.
The emphasis throughout Joshi's talk was that people were becoming visually literate so the visual medium of images, documentaries would work well in the contemporary world. One example, he quoted was combining Rabindranath Tagore's poetry as recited by the bard himself with interviews and photographs from the late Shambu Saha collection. During his stint at Shantiniketan, Saha documentedTagore and the activities of Shantiniketan by capturing several rare and poignant moments of Tagore and his associates.
Another possibility, he said could be to juxtapose famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson's images of socio-political life in India with Sunil Janah's photo documentation of tribal life in India.
From the West, Joshi drew on examples of the visual approach pioneered by the late American late Mathew B. Brady (1822-1896), regarded as the father of photo journalism. Brady built up a huge collection of over 16,000 photographs of the American Civil War taken by him and his assistants. Today thousands of the photographs are preserved in Washingtonbased US National Archives and
Records Administration and the Library of Congress.
Much later, said Joshi, came American director and celebrated 20th century documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns (born July 29, 1953), greatly inspired by Brady. Burns has used archival footage and photographs to make documentary films such as "The Civil War", "Baseball", "Jazz" and “Prohibition". Even today his technique known as the "Ken Burns' Effect" with its panning and zooming effect is used in video production from still imagery.
And digitisation of archives "with its endless possibilities" Joshi concluded, was the only solution to disasters such as the loss of precious footage due the accidental erasure of videos in government-owned television channel Doordarshan some time ago.