Abstract
Abstract
Photography’s ability to make a phenomenon believable authenticates it as an act
to record memory to archive pictorial heritage. Photography has a strong role in
building collective visual narratives based on memories over the course of history.
Due to trustworthiness in its character photography has been used in articulating
individual and collective identities. This paper re-identifies par excellence writer,
columnist, and poet Munnu Bhai, by a visit through a brief selection of his
portraits captured over significant phases of his life. It investigates the sitter
through semiotic analysis theories invented by leading critics in order to explore
Munnu Bhai’s journey, his passions, failures and successes keeping in view his
socio-economic predispositions. Whilst interpreting first layer of ‘representation’
of a posed celebrity, Munnu Bhai, in front of the camera ‘who thinks who he is’ or
‘he wants others to think who he is’, and by sensing Barthes ‘air’ or seeing the
unseen at the deeper layer. Hence, this paper rediscovers his ‘aura and beyond’
by re-describing the connotations apparently subdued in the photographic frame.
Ahmad Bilal, Aysha Bilal. (2018) Munnu Bhai; Aura and Beyond through Portraiture, Journal of the Punjab University Historical Society, Volume 31, issue 1.
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