Cartier-Bresson and the Birth of Modem India which is represented by art historians as the cultural product forged by centuries of artistic labour in the Renaissance as it spread across Europe, and after. In contemporary India, the photographic aesthetic takes root and proliferates under the impetus of capitalism, within a network of technological conditions, political strate-38 gies and economic imperatives vastly different from those which attended its maturation in the west. Everyday instances of this aesthetic are: use of the soft focus in advertisements for feminine products and in love scenes in the cinema, use of tonal washes in advertisements for condoms to heighten the erotic effect of the picture, the employment of steely forms in the composition of cigarette advertisements and in filmic shots of heroic individualism, use of landscape compositional principles for tourism, the central function of pictorial balance in sports photography, etc. Doubtless, it is inadequate to simply say that 'the photographic aesthetic takes root' in India, because what needs to be explored, on the one hand, is precisely the restructuring, translation, of this aesthetic which renders it current and meaningful in our culture.1 On the other hand, what needs to be studied also is how these aesthetic principles of varying import constitute a substantial part of the cut-and-thrust of the perennial ideological battle to produce and shift what may be called locations of the modem viewer-subject in India: locations which entrain specific attitudes of consumption, patterns of imagination and modes of desiring. There is also, lastly, the geographic proliferation of the photographic medium—a proliferation in which individual pictures are reproduced in hundreds and thousands by different processes for distribution—in magazines, newspapers, television, cinema and communications satellite.2 Ready for them or not, increasingly more people in different parts of the country are being bombarded by different reproduced images of 'the new world order. This aesthetic is invisible in so far as it embeds itself in our perceptual frameworks, getting 'naturalized' through the various links it forges with the subject positions we inhabit. It becomes visible in those increasingly rare contexts and situations which, due to various historical processes, permit us to refuse and resist the position of viewer-subject made available to us. We must look, therefore, at such 'rarer' instances of the photographic aesthetics to foreground what remains invisible in the more common images we see every day. Cartier-Bresson's images are products of unusual technical skill, and are informed by an arrogance and confidence characteristic of the west's cultural project. Their accessibility to a critique stems from this moment of double mastery: of the medium and of the world, which in our historical context work against each other and permit us to explore their anatomy. CURRENCY AND THE PHOTOGRAPH The first picture we analyse is of a moneychanger, who sprawls his bulging body on his pavement shop, looking out at the lens with an expansive smile. The camera, however, discloses his 'real' self, having caught him at the moment when he overlaid his smile with a twist of covert cynicism. His associate, wearing a Journal of Arts & Ideas