Irinia Werning: The time traveller’s photographer

Sepia-tinted, frayed photos have a charm of their own. They hark back to a time when cameras were mostly seen in photo studios or in the hands of the wealthy. Then, there came a time when photos were shot for posterity and even had a fun, unreachable element to them — they had people sitting on an artificial moon, dressing up as kings, queens or gods, driving a chariot or even posing with a poster of the Eiffel Tower in the backdrop.

As Argentinian photographer Irina Werning, 35, looks at old photos, she sees images that beg to be recreated. Her ongoing project, 'Back to the Future', does just that. It involves her subjects trying to re-enact a childhood photograph, resulting in images that capture a sense of the subject’s biography. Each image is a diptych, showing the past and the present.

Werning started out quite by accident. Born in Buenos Aires, she completed her BA in Economics, MA in History and then did her MA in Photographic Journalism. “I always fall in love with old pictures. Once, in the middle of scanning a few of them, I came across a building that was prominently displayed in one picture and I thought of recreating that image,” she says. Werning wrote to her friends and family, asking them to email their pictures to her, so she could recreate the past. She put up the details of the project on her website and the idea soon spread, with strangers emailing her their pictures. Werning has recreated photos in Germany, Denmark, Italy, UK and is in New Delhi to work with people for her project.

Culture quotient
Werning says she came across kitschy and funny studio pictures in India. Anil Cherukupalli, 30, a Delhi-based photographer and founder of the magazine Aksgar, was one of her first subjects. His childhood picture has him at the age of two, with a garland and holding a moon in a studio. 

This week, his shoot with Werning lasted for an hour and was “more difficult than expected”. Cherukupalli says he held the paper moon for long minutes, and often wondered what he was doing there in the first place.

For Werning, this project makes for absorbing study. “If you pay attention to detail, there is so much you can learn from old photos. You can see the country’s culture through them — what people ate, how they dressed, how they celebrated events and weddings...” says Werning.

When Sucharita Suri, a graphic designer based in Mumbai, sent across a photograph of herself dressed as a bride when she was three years old, Werning was hooked. “My mum got my picture clicked in a studio. I wore some jewellery and a red sari,” says Suri. The photograph was shot in Assam. Suri’s husband, Amit, has a childhood picture where he is dressed in a frock. On Saturday, Suri and her husband travelled to Delhi to get their photos shot in the same setting again. For them, it’s a “fun thing”.

Amit’s photograph maybe embarrassing, but that has hardly stopped people from sending Werning their photos. Werning has shot a young girl naked except for an accordion which covers the bottom half of her body and a man posing as he did when he was a baby — crawling and naked. The idea, says Werning, is to be as authentic to the past as possible.

Carbon copy
Werning’s attention to detail makes her diptychs work. The similarity in the then-and-now pictures can leave viewers astounded, the only exception being the difference in the subjects’ ages.

Werning’s work begins long before the actual shoot. Once she selects a photograph, she begins the search for props. Werning traverses internet auction sites, secondhand stores, borrows from friends’ wardrobes and then sets about cutting, dying, sewing, attaching, adapting, assembling, gluing, colouring, painting and renting rare and hard to find objects. Anything that cannot be readily found is made from scratch.

“All I had to do was show up there, she even organised the matching clothes and glasses” says Ram Malhotra, an interior consultant in Delhi. Werning and Malhotra have recreated a picture when Malhotra was 12 years old, facing the Taj Mahal, which is reflected in his glasses.

Werning also shoots animals and landscapes, but Back to the Future is her pet project. For her, it satisfies that intrinsic need in every human being. “They want to go back to their future. Humans are nostalgic creatures.”