On discovering that his father was diagnosed with seminal vesicles carcinoma in 2012, photographer Adil Hasan ran to his father's aid in Jamshedpur, leaving behind all his photography equipment. Keeping his ailing father company...
A selection from the photo book, When Abba was Ill. Pic/AdilâÂu00c2u0080Âu00c2u0088Hasan
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On discovering that his father was diagnosed with seminal vesicles carcinoma in 2012, photographer Adil Hasan ran to his father's aid in Jamshedpur, leaving behind all his photography equipment. Keeping his ailing father company, he found two film cameras to shoot with; the body of images would later become a book titled, When Abba was Ill, published in 2014.
Hasan's father passed away six months after he was diagnosed with cancer. "When you look at the photo book, it seems like I only photographed him. But, that is not the case. There was a lot that I shot, but the tight edit of the book gives that impression," he says. Photographer Sanjeev Saith, who edited the book, says it is one of the few personal documentary accounts of loss that have emerged from the country. "While public loss and public death have been photographed extensively by photojournalists, private loss is yet to be taken up as a subject," he says. He adds that, in one way, hospitals are continuously "documenting" disease, decay and death. Every time you get an X-ray or an MRI done, a record is made permanently. "These imaging techniques are in some ways like photography. When it comes to art, however, there are other questions. There are parallel strains of subjectivity and objectivity at play," he says. He evokes Illustration of Life by Max Khandola, who recorded the passing away of his father, right up to the moment of his death. The photos were abstracted compositions of the illness - seepages of blood and stained white sheets.
Adil Hasan
As a society, observes Saith, we are not shy of expressing sorrow. But, with publishing a book or on a social media platform, we open up to a public consumption of private grief. "We don't question photojournalists when they shoot these subjects. So, why should we judge an individual who wants to document the passing away of a loved one? Most of us don't understand the inexorable circumstances and the sheer exhaustion that are part of this experience," says Saith.
Sanjeev Saith
Hasan recalls the time when he considered publishing When Abba Was Ill and the questions he was riddled with. Was he "exploiting" a personal grief? "As a photographer, there was no denying that I knew the potential of these images but I asked myself if I was exploiting my father's death. I showed the images often to my family and published them only when I had my own validation for the decision. I think my family has benefitted from this work. It is a positive confrontation of death, and it is therapeutic and cathartic," he says.
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