Life, camera & a stark world: A retrospective of Prabuddha Dasgupta's work

Mention Prabuddha Dasgupta and chances are that the few who recognise him will remember he was the photographer who shot the controversial Tuff-shoes ads with Milind Soman and Madhu Sapre in the buff and the risque Kamasutra ads with Pooja Bedi in the 1990s. But that's the general, layperson's view – to connoisseurs, Prabuddha, who died unexpectedly in 2012, was one of India's most exciting photographers, not just in the genre of fashion or glamour photography, but also as an artist for whom photography became a way of exploring new ways of seeing. It's heartening then that the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi has mounted a very large exhibition of his works and is acquiring 100 of them – a significant distinction in a country where fashion photography has yet to make the switch to art.

In many ways, Prabuddha Dasgupta: A Journey, which opened last week is a homecoming for the celebrated fashion photographer. Prabuddha's father, the eminent sculptor Pradosh Dasgupta was director of NGMA for 13 years from 1957 to 1970, and the premises of the country's premier modern and contemporary art repository, is where the young photographer lived as a young boy. "I spent a lot of time in the air-conditioned rooms (of the NGMA) if only to escape the terrifying Delhi summers," the wall text at the show quotes Prabuddha.

One can imagine the boy Prabuddha wandering through the narrow corridors of Jaipur House, the NGMA's old wing where 91 of his works now hang - and how the canvases he saw hanging there changed the way he looked at the world. "My favourite was the Amrita Sher-Gil room – women, dark skinned, with haunting eyes and upturned breasts," Prabuddha has been quoted as saying. "Their melancholic faces, suggestive of suppressed desires and passive eroticism. So it was only natural that when a camera found its way into my hands some 15 years ago, I would point its gaze at women."

Prabuddha is best known for his photographs of women – some nude, but all beautiful and moving – and many of these are up on the walls at the NGMA. There are images from the commercial, commissioned assignments for magazines and brands that he worked on. Then there are others that he did as an individual artist, some that were later compiled into exhibitions and books such as Women (1996), which shocked with its unabashed attitude to nudity, the bare, other-worldly landscape of Ladakh, and Edge of Faith, a series on the Catholic community in Goa.

But any visitor who's gone expressly to look at the nudes is likely to come away disappointed. For there's something sterile about them – one can marvel at their clean lines, the play of light and shadow, the beautiful interesting textures captured, and the way the image-maker frames his subject. Like with fashion on the ramp, one can marvel at the spectacle but can't relate to it. In contrast, it's the shots of clothed women captured in a series of candid, intimate shots, especially that of a pregnant woman in camisole, her trouser pulled down from her bare tummy as she looks straight into the camera, that are more interesting, sexier even.

"No one in India photographed women like Prabuddha did," says Devika Daulet-Singh, who runs PhotoInk, Delhi's only photographs only gallery. "There was a sensuality in his image-making, a knowingness, an indulgence in the way he framed them." I can only agree.