![\"\"](\"http:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2013\/03\/12\/world\/asia\/12-Neha-art-IndiaInk-slide-SGWX\/12-Neha-art-IndiaInk-slide-SGWX-jumbo.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Susan Sontag showed up in Mumbai this week. Mumbai is hosting its first ever photography festival, the FOCUS Photography Festival<\/a>. The Festival has two key exhibitions: `A Fantastic Legacy: Early Bombay Photography, from 1840 to 1900<\/a>\u2019; and `A Photograph is Not an Opinion \u2013 Contemporary Photography by Women<\/a>\u2019. The title of the latter exhibition \u201cborrows its title from Susan Sontag\u2019s essay<\/a> `A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?\u2019 from the book Women<\/i>.\u201d As one of the curators explained<\/a>, \u201cThe book implies that while men are under pressure to produce one strong opinion, the strength of the women\u2019s point of view it accommodates many viewpoints. What I am trying to say in the title is that there are variations of the truth being presented in this exhibition.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n What was the truth of women that Sontag was trying to understand in her 1999 essay, which introduced Annie Leibovitz\u2019s book, entitled simply, and impossibly, Women<\/i>, and how does that truth ring today?<\/p>\n Sontag\u2019s essay opens wondering about<\/a> \u201ca book of photographs of people with nothing more in common than that they are women (and living in America at the end of the twentieth century)… A large number of pictures of what is, nominally, a single subject will inevitably be felt to be representative in some sense. How much more so with this subject, with this book, an anthology of destinies and disabilities and new possibilities; a book that invites the sympathetic responses we bring to the depiction of a minority (for that is what women are, by every criterion except the numerical), featuring many portraits of those who are a credit to their sex. Such a book has to feel instructive, even if it tells us what we think we already know about the overcoming of perennial impediments and prejudices and cultural handicaps, the conquest of new zones of achievement. Of course, such a book would be misleading if it did not touch on the bad news as well: the continuing authority of demeaning stereotypes, the continuing violence (domestic assault is the leading cause of injuries to American women) belongs to the ongoing story of how women are presented, and how they are invited to think of themselves. A book of photographs of women must, whether it intends to or not, raise the question of women\u2014 there is no equivalent `question of men.\u2019 Men, unlike women, are not a work in progress.\u201d<\/p>\n The rest of the essay attempts to think historically, aesthetically and politically about a book that photographs only women, about a book of photographs of women. Sontag concludes<\/a>: \u201cA book of photographs; a book about women; a very American project \u2026 It\u2019s for us to decide what to make of these pictures. A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?\u201d<\/p>\n A very American project in 1999 becomes \u2026 a very metropolitan, Indian, transnational, global project in 2013? What does that mean? What happens when the subject of women moves from women as the object and objects of `our\u2019 gaze(s), a crisis of representation, to women as the makers, and specifically as the makers of vision? What happens when a book of photographs `about women\u2019 becomes a space of women?<\/p>\n