Documentation is way past its expiry date: Rohit Chawla

What happens when paint is swapped with pixels? Something of the sort that you see in the photographs alongside. Photographer Rohit Chawla’s The Inspired Frame, part of Tasveer’s eleventh season of exhibitions, pays a tribute to three renowned and seminal artists, including Raja Ravi Varma, Gustav Klimt and Frida Kahlo. The photographer has skillfully reconstructed compositions as featured in their famous works of art, using contemporary models to recreate life-like experiences of the originals. The exhibition also features select works inspired by miniature paintings and is on from April 4-22 at Akara Art.

Recreating with a twist

For Rohit, the process of recreating is interesting. The first series that the Delhi-based photographer started work on was with Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings, a couple of years ago. “He was a great calender artist. Some of the contemporary artists might scoff at his work, but he was relevant. His works lend themselves to photographic recreation,” he says. After that, he attempted Gustav Klimt, an artist whose sensibility, Rohit says is in direct contrast with his. “Klimt is all about excess with his embellishments and Egypitian motifs, whereas my sensibility is about minimalism and the austere. But I wanted to push myself in order to achieve his sensibility,” he says. With Frida’s paintings, he says the attempt was to have a sense of humour. “We didn’t follow the paintings completely but added a bit of a twist,” he reveals.

While friends such as Neha Dhupia, Lisa Haydon, Chitrangda Singh, Kalyani Chawla among others played models, fashion designers Sabyasachi and Tarun Tahiliani created the outfits. “Sabyasachi brought an Indo-Western sensibility to the clothes for the photographs inspired by Frida’s paintings. Tarun did the clothes for the paints inspired by Raja Ravi Varma and the miniature paintings. “Nothing was photoshopped. We had to create the jewels as well. You can find an echo of the paintings in the photographs,” says Rohit.

The staged image

The days of the lazy photographer, Rohit says, are over. “The banality of documentation is way past its expiry date. As a fine art photographer, your responsibility is to do a little more. So it’s no longer about documentation but increasingly becoming more about the staged image,” says the photographer who has spent 20 years of his life in the advertising field, before moving out to start his own design and film production company and pursue his interest in photography professionally. “News photography is great but fine art photography can’t just be about documenting beautiful clouds and buildings with dramatic filters. Photoshop can’t be an excuse for photography anymore,” believes Rohit, whose next exhibition Eyes Wide Shut will feature some of the best known people in various fields with their eyes closed.