living and loving the life of a photographer
04/Mar/2008
Bhaiyya, yeh Contemporary kya hota hai?
Last weekend, I was in Delhi, where I saw lots of pics and bought a book. Alright, let me try that again with some flair.
Last weekend, I was in Delhi, where the smog hangs thickly and the bhaiyya-log wear swayters all year round, to attend what could have been the greatest thing going for the photographic arts in India this year.
Just Arrived, Delhi.
Vadehra Art Gallery, traditionally a bastion of contemporary art, decided to throw its weight behind photography, now that folks seem willing to pay for it. Sunil Gupta and Radhika Singh were appointed as curators. Instead of rounding up the usual suspects, they spent months scouring the land far and wide and (rumour has it that they) considered the work of about 800 photographers. Nearly a year later, their effort manifests itself in the form of a massive exhibition of 163 prints from 86 photographers spread across two floors of Vadehra's Okhla gallery, punctuating the discussion (if any at all) on where contemporary Indian photography stands today. The exhibition runs concurrently at Grosvenor Vadehra in London. More info.
Last weekend, I was in Delhi because a couple of my prints were part of this historic exhibition.
That's all very fine, but what can we make of two halls of unrelated, uncaptioned images of everything under the Indian sun? It's like reading 163 pages from 86 different novels. In that sense, the exhibition was simply overwhelming and smacked of a popular Delhi sport of namedropping. If it promoted any dialog about Indian photography, it was perhaps to point out that it's all over the place.
Also, ‘contemporary’ seems like a nice word to throw around in art circles. I'm not sure if some of the classical b/w images and rustic themes belonged there. My main grouse, however, was with the glaring omissions. A compendium of Indian contemporary photography would be incomplete without Anay Mann and Anita Khemka in it. I can take a very good guess as to what happened, but not here.
For those of you who still want to crack the contemporary photography puzzle, see India Now, a new book edited by Alain Willaume with Devika Daulat-Singh. I managed to get hold of a copy from Bookworm at Connaught Place for Rs. 2065.
While Vadehra tries to encapsulate contemporary Indian photography, India Now's purpose is to lay out the contemporary photographic vision of India. Got it? And it stays true to its purpose beautifully. India Now opens with a few Raghu Rai frames, the sagging quality of which indicates that grandpa is unable to keep up with our digital times, and moves to greater heights from thereon.
One of the featured works is Stephan Elleringmann's Golden Quadrilateral series. I was Stephan's assistant for 8 weeks when we travelled about 10,000km on India's new highways. It was the personal snapshots that I made during that journey (using a shitty compact camera) that are currently on exhibit at Vadehra!
This entry was cross posted on mutiny.in. Follow the discussion there!
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