<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\nWedding portraits testifying to self-respect can therefore be thought of as didactic fables of the modern age. Small lives can now be writ large. The choice one makes at the most personal level, of who to love has larger historical ramification, where the attainment of true love also promises theological liberation, from a life dictated by the stars and the tyranny of Brahminical determinism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photographs in the presses magnified the forcefulness of such a claim, not by increasing the audibility of its political message but by holding out a vision of truth\u2019s supposed timelessness. Marriage portraits stage a world outside of present time, inhabiting a past present future in which freedom is a given and transcendent. In turn, it returns the newspaper readers\u2019 gaze, bestowing its taricanam<\/em>, as reciprocation of consolation and prophecy. The term is the Tamil equivalent to darsana<\/em>, through which the pictorial is recognized as animated and responsive towards our line of sight. Just as we behold the image, so too do images make demand of us. We too are in their line of sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOver the course of the pandemic, this moral fable on love has a staying power in its capacity to remind us of the power of image operation. Our fear that a recourse to a more two-dimensional world through various forms of digital interfaces could only amount to simulated and therefore inauthentic forms of representation and interactions that ultimately rob us of embodiment. Yet theorizing images as having the ability to shape and to intervene into our reality, complicates the platonic metaphysics that have a stranglehold on what we understand to be an image. It seems that we are only beginning to turn our backs away from the shadows of enchantment projected on the walls of the cave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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AUTHOR<\/strong> Simon Soon, University of Malaya, Malaysia<\/p>\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u3010by Simon Soon, Dec. 2021\u3011 There are number of photographs mentioned in Dinesh Sathisan\u2019s MA thesis on the Tamil presses\u2019 formative role in shaping Tamil cultural identity during the interwa…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
Sight | Simon Soon - Critical Asia Archives<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n