Light Skin Dark Skin

Abhi Chinniah

Upstairs Gallery, Lopdell House, Auckland

22 May - 14 June 2020

Garnet Station, Westmere, Auckland

21 June - 5 July 2020

Available to view online from 14 July

Reviewed for PhotoForum by Divyaa Kumar, 05 July 2020

Within the breadth of cultures that make up the umbrella term People of Colour, there is a huge weight put behind the idea that the pathway to become beautiful is directly linked with whiteness. This is particularly noticeable within the vast Indian beauty industry. Whitening creams litter the beauty market, soaps and scrubs and cleansers, all advertised to bleach and scrape and wipe the melanin from your skin. More often than not, there are one or two brown foundations for every twenty variations of 'cream’. European beauty standards of bright, white skin are idolised as what we, People of Colour (PoC), should work towards - it is a behaviour drilled into us from birth, a by-product of a violent and deep colonial conquest. One’s skin colour is our most available avenue to identify who people are, where they come from, and is something people tend to make snap observations about, registering quickly and making immediate judgments upon. Colour becomes race, opinion becomes judgement.

Photography on the other hand, provides us with moments of pause. We get to analyse and become critical of our otherwise immediate perceptions. Abhi Chinniah’s exhibition at Upstairs Gallery in Titirangi provides its visitors a rare moment of stillness for us to become aware and absorb our judgements, to turn them over and examine them.

Chinniah, of Malaysian heritage by way of Sri Lankan Tamils, was born in Christchurch, where even as a child, she experienced the harsh realities of racist opinion. Being met with racial slurs on a regular basis, even being thrown down a flight of stairs at the age of six, has an enormous effect on the psyche, on how we perceive ourselves in our society, especially in young children. Even when the family relocated back to her parent’s home country, Chinniah could not escape the weights of racial prejudice and oppression. There are race-class divides that structure Malaysian society as well - separation of Malays, Chinese and Indians, all victims of deeply entrenched, brutal colonial histories, tightly woven into the fabric of society.

Chinniah notes in her blog post for Photo Forum that one of her most notable experiences regarding racism - and it’s equally parasitic sister colorism - is built around her skin colour in comparison to her amma. Chinniah is dark-skinned, [1] whereas her amma is light-skinned. People would make passing comments, in pitying tones, about Chinniah’s similarities with her father, “so black lah”. [2] She notes that at the time the comments weren’t intentionally malicious, just a way of life, normal and expected. It is only later as we get older, that most of us realise the cruelty baked into those flippant phrases, readily interpreted as “you are not better, because you aren’t fair”.[3]

Chinnaiah unpacks these fraught and tumultuous experiences with the camera as her vehicle, sharing with us five lush portraits of Indian women, captured in sharp hyperfocus and crisp, glossy colours. In each of these portraits, the women are pensive, regal and seemingly aware of your gaze, and unashamed of it. They sit comfortably, but with a sense of anticipation, as if waiting for a soon coming confrontation. It becomes apparent, the longer you look, how long and hard these women have fought for this casual comfort in their skin.

Unusually, each photograph shares wall space with an equal sized statement, giving the women photographed an avenue to express their own opinions. It is rare for the subjects of photographs to afford any say in their image, so this gesture on Chinnaiah’s behalf is generous and boundary pushing. There is a rich and often hurtful history of PoC being exploited in photographic portraiture, especially the documentary kind - their image taken and shown the world over with little regard to the subjects themselves. In providing these statements - which as the same size as the portraits, offer an equality of power between the women and Chinnaiah - the women are provided agency over how we get to perceive their image, and what is talked about in conjunction.

Each statement outlines each woman’s own individual experiences with racism and colourism. The descriptions are varied and wide, ranging from seemingly innocent racist comments to death threats and skinheads hurling racial epithets. The statements provide us a more intimate point of access, and gives a way to deeper understand the strength in these images.

In the portrait of Sunaina Kamath, the first one in the room that catches my eye, the fight for bodily comfort is felt keenly. Draped in baby pink fabric, Kamath poses in a relaxed manner, one arm resting on the arm on the wicker back chair, the other across her lap, but this carefully loose posture belies a private battle, fought daily in the arena of colourism. Kamath is light skinned, which makes her battles with skin colour different to Chinniah. In her accompanying text, Kamath outlines the different battles faced by light-skinned Indians - instead of people ridiculing your cultural identity, they instead constantly question if you even are Indian. Her strength is keenly felt, but you are quickly made aware of how hard won this strength is.

Another portrait that caught my attention was the one of Neelam O’Neil. O’Neil is a New Zealand Para Athlete, and sits for the portrait in her wheelchair, dressed in a purple and pink salwar. Of all the portraits in the gallery, hers is the only one not looking at you directly. She gazes off to the side, chin resting on her hand, and seems contemplative. On having her face something we can’t see, her gaze elsewhere, the tone of the photograph is less confrontational, but rather more as if O’Neil knows what you’ve thought, and has already moved on. Her wheelchair isn’t hidden, nor is it flaunted - it just simply is there.

Photographs and portraits of disabled people are often occupied with the disability itself, not the person with it. Here, O’Neil’s disability is made as normal a feature of her person as her skin colour is - the focus is clearly on O’Neil herself, and her experiences in her body, not just how she interacts with colourism. There is an intersection, and overlap of these parts of herself, which inform her experiences.

Her text shares different discriminations from that of Chinniah and Kamath, and the other photographed women. In hers, O’Neil describes moments of snap judgement and the effects that they have, whereas some of the other texts share brutal racist encounters and other sharped-edged memories. Each woman outlines different encounters, with each experience stemming from their own varied ancestral and religious backgrounds. O’Neil is Fijian-Indian, whereas Chinniah is Malaysian-Indian. Kamath makes note of her Anglo-Indian background, and one of the other women, Alexia Santamaria, explains her roots in Goa (a Catholic region) and what is now Pakistan, with its old Protestant history. These differences - cultural, religious, regional and bodily - are part of what makes Chinniah’s exhibit so enriching. Not only is a variety of different experiences on show, but a variety of backgrounds and history, challenging us to confront our own preconceptions on who is Indian, and what it might mean for us to change those ideas.

Chinniah’s photographic portraiture work champions the concepts of self-deception and personal agency, of providing pathways for People of Colour to define the terms of their imagery, as part of a larger over-aching global goal of anti-racist thought and action. For a new voice and vision in the field, and as someone coming from the community she represents, the steps Chinniah has taken in this debut exhibition mark an exciting and rewarding future of possibilities.

As Sunaina Kamath, says in her statement, “The only way to look racism in the face is to be proud of who you are, where you’re from, and above all, the colour of your skin, I know for certain that regardless of what anyone says, my identity is what I choose it to be”.

Divyaa Kumar, of Pākehā and Fijian-Indian heritage, is an artist, writer, object maker, and part-time librarian from Tamaki Makaurau.

Footnotes:

1 Amma - Hindi for ‘mother’

2 Abhi Chinnaih, Light Skin Dark Skin, Blog Post for PhotoForum

3 Chinniah, Blogpost for PhotoForum

This review is supported by funding from Creative New Zealand.