The real big picture
A selection of photographs, photomontage and digital works by eight photography artists (lens based artists) was exhibited in ‘Lens-ing It’ curated by Johnny ML. The show focused on the works of artists who use photography as photography; they are lens based artists and often use their photographic prints as their final product. In
this Age of Media, or Age of Information based as it is on the digitally captured ephemeral image, the photograph is struggling to claim the longue duree. A space where the photograph is more than just a document of the moment, of the event, of the happening, it is a conceptual space based on a dialogue between the photographer, the camera and the image.
This kind of photography constantly negotiates between reality and its alterity thus creating space for multivalent interpretations, even when confronted by a clear and direct image. Vikas Vilasini’s series Between One Shore and Several Others is a case in point. He has documented people bearing iconic names such as Stalin, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and the like. After the initial sense of whimsy, one explores the idea and impulses that must have led to such an act, followed by a need to know about their fates, lives and milieu. The impassive portraits give little hint of their lived reality.
Manish Gera Baswani on the other hand delves into the lives of her subjects, animating them and their surroundings. A painter by training, Manisha has photographed her senior and contemporary painters in their private and creative spaces, not documenting the creative process but making the artists’ part of the creation itself. Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh cradling his grandson, and Nilima Shaikh surrounded and festooned in her canvas scrolls hanging from the ceiling reflect different kinds of intimacy, with the emotional and the creative. A self conscious dialogic between the producer and product is formed in the portrait of Anupam Sud sitting in a chair underneath imitating the posture of the woman in her canvas.
The show goes beyond the eyeball catching disaster photography or the momentarily flashing news. It is documentary, ideological and conceptual mediated by framing and positioning.
— Dr Seema Bawa is an art historian, curator and critic
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