Farming on Facebook, Camera-less Food Photography and a New Indian Pastoral

Introduction

Kheti Badi is a photo-series produced from screenshots of Farmville, an Adobe Flash gaming application on Facebook. The game’s meteoric rise happened early, drawing more than one million daily active users within the first four days of its release. Chinar Shah, the photographer behind Kheti Badi, began making the series in the years immediately following Farmville’s release in 2009. Shah quickly adopted the technique of pixelating jpeg files made from the original screenshots, a creative strategy that would exaggerate what she terms the images’ ‘synthetic’ and ‘cartoon’ appearance. Kheti Badi’s starting point of screenshots in lieu of camera-made images, preference for pixelated over sharpened images and use of digital visual effects as both means to and the subject of its representation situates the work outside the generic conventions of documentary photography. While Kheti Badi shares with social documentary photography its commitment to the social world, it captures images related to land and livelihood in India not from the field and through the lens of a camera but from the vantage point of a computer screen with software built into the computer’s operating system. Party to a still unfolding history of photography, the photo-series expands the boundaries of photography to focus attention on digital media’s displacement of issues affecting farmers and farming in the Indian context.

Figure 1.

[Untitled] (© [2015], [Chinar Shah], used with permission)

Chinar remembers sitting in class in what must have been second standard when she learned for the first time that India was an agriculture-based economy. The news came to young Chinar as a surprise on account of never having set foot on a farm. Neither was she aware of the importance of farming to the approximated 53% of the population who, according to the 2011 Census of India, made all or a substantial part of their livelihood from the land (Sainath, 2013). An agency operating under the Indian Ministry of Commerce put this figure at 58% in 2018 while describing the 157.35 million hectares dedicated to agriculture in India, which places it second in the world in terms of agrarian land use (India Brand Equity Foundation IBEF, 2019). All these years later, Shah is plowing the land, planting seeds, harvesting crops, and raising farm animals and livestock on Farmville’s screen-based plots of land. She is, in her estimation, ‘a farmer online and a photographer on the land’ (Interview with Chinar Shah).

Online Farming

The measure with which the invitation of the game’s developer Zygna to ‘take a nostalgic journey into the countryside’ resonated worldwide is evident in the 38,404,103 likes garnered by its Facebook fan page by 2015 (Farmville Facebook Page, 2015). More recently, the page would appear to have been ‘un-liked’ in reasonably significant numbers – at the time of writing, its page likes number 32,687,335 (Farmville Facebook Page, 2019). However, although the game earned considerable fandom on Facebook, its notional transposition of farming and animal husbandry to a virtual environment attracted ample criticism in the regular media: Time magazine named it among the ‘50 worst inventions’ of 2010 for being predicated on a ‘series of mindless chores on a digital farm’ (Fletcher, 2010). In its editorial a little over a year after the game launched, and by which time 61,411,787 Facebook users worldwide were playing FarmVille, The New York Times (2010) cautioned readers that ‘what is being farmed isn’t only the virtual crops. It’s also the users’ social connections, their attention, and, ultimately, their credit cards’ (p. A18). From these perspectives in journalism, the millions of people worldwide who had begun transitioning freely and easily between social networking and gaming became a metaphor for the ease with which global capitalism could monetize the individual’s habituated attention to social media and affective ties to food and nostalgia for farming. Meantime, at the height of strawberry season, Shah would rush home, go online and harvest her berries before they spoiled.