(Sensuous) Ways of Seeing in Stone Town, Zanzibar: patina, pose, punctum. Issue 1 (2nd January 2018) - Gupta, Pamila
ABSTRACT: In his influential BBC series and landmark book on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), author John Berger suggests that how we see things is determined by what we know. This article takes up his point to explore creative ways of seeing (and thus reading, viewing, interpreting, writing about, displaying, curating) the Ranchhod and Rohit Oza (father and son) vernacular photography collection from Stone Town, Zanzibar that spans 1930 to the present. This paper is a visual experiment; it provides an alternative way of approaching the Capital Art Studio (CAS) archive less as a body of work that serves as a window onto or illustration of Zanzibari history, daily life and culture. Rather this paper offers an alternative organisational framing, one that is a working through of the distinct characteristics of the medium itself, with a focus on incompleteness and its ability to "look." Here the paper takes on ideas of patina, pose and punctum to open up and shift to more (sensuous) ways of seeing the Oza archive.