Email
Print
ShareAn exhibition of world-class photography currently on in Mumbai features images of another time and place. David de Souza takes a look and is overwhelmed
The Photograph : Painted, Posed and of the Moment is perhaps the most significant collection of photography to be shown. It is wonderfully curated, with not one image out of place or superfluous. Go prepared, with comfortable shoes and time to spare; you cannot and should not rush through it. In many ways, the show is a harbinger of things to come, boding very well indeed for photography and the arts.
The photographs are arranged in a very finite order at every etage of the gallery. As you enter, you will be mesmerised by images that are almost etched into the collective unconscious. All are familiar. When you stand in front of an original Henri Cartier Bresson bromide, it's like meeting an old friend, an aristocrat, a god. Everything that can be said about Bresson has been, but there are magnificent texts by artists, sociologists, historians, musicians, editors, photographers, writers and theatre personalities, providing insight in words where the silence of the still image could be more eloquent.
According to Kobo Abe, a Bresson image is not a window into space, rather into time. Most of Bresson's images exceed the Einsteinian restrictions of space/time; they move into a zone of timelessness. The geography and specificity of the title Mexico 1934, for instance, become redundant. Ferdinando Scianca speaks of another Mexico 1934 (the image of a veiled woman with a child): he celebrates the 'lack of sentimentality or the picturesque' and is spared of the 'blackmail of rhetoric'. Scianca says that it was 'taken in Mexico but devoid of mexicanisation'. This might well be a lesson to photographers who trump the ethnic.
Andre Pieyne writes about what he calls the 'love spiders' -- two lesbian women tastefully revealing just enough without being salacious. The issue of the photographer as voyeur does crop up repeatedly. Eduardo Arroyo notes that the humorous photograph of two men in Brussels 1932, 'one peeping through a hole at reality that is concealed from us and the other in a bowler hat looking around suspiciously at being observed' reminds us that we, the purveyor of the camera's view, are all in the picture. The notion of photograph as premonition is revealed by Leonardo Sciasia with Sevilla, Spain 1933:the children seem to be 'playing with war, a war they do not yet know'.
Bresson gave up photography for 15 years till his death; his decisive finger was sketching instead. No doubt he would be one of the most vivisected photographers that ever lived. His work will be scanned for psychological, social, anthropological and aesthetic nuances. Cartier Bresson is not a photographer, he is Photography.
Pablo Bartholomew -- known and loved since his junior world press days and with sporadic visual interventions -- was perhaps significant by his absence. He seemed to be lost and unable to find a new way of telling old stories. The second floor digs through his archive and, in all those years of sex drugs and rock and roll, reveals what he found worthy of imaging; this is a sort of confession, laying open his private diary. There are some matter-of-fact photos of a Lavatory 1975, Carmen's house, Bathroom shelf and a college dining room that speak of honesty and non-pretentiousness that invades most modern ways of seeing. The fungus on his self portrait negatives are in some ways as telling. The Jawa motorcycle and the rounded-edged Allwyn refrigerator are visual semiotics of an era.
Dayanita Singh's Sent a Letter moves away from the arrogance of the limited edition archival print to a more engaging, human, quiet, understated, accordion series of books that you can posses when you leave the gallery. These are small jewels of private communication, all the images in a square format and contact size. There is an intimacy, beauty and stillness to them. She shares space with Nony Singh, her mother, whose need to archive the family is beautifully depicted. The portraits are exquisite.
On the fourth floor is Umrao Singh Sher-Gil, whose many self portraits and gorgeous little sepia contact prints speak of His Misery, His Manuscripts and narcissism. The autochrome back-lit images of family are stunningly beautiful.
The only other colour photographs, ironically, are those that predate colour photography. They belong to the Alkazi collection. There are the familiar colonial Deen Dayal-type images, but more interesting are the later hand-tinted photos which gave the original black-and-whites a new context, adding a layer of the aesthetic of a different decade.
The exhibit is under-lit, not surprisingly, since the pigments and dyes would fade. Astonishing images could be an inspiration to a whole generation of contemporary photographers and artists alike, but the jewel in the crown is a hand coloured Daguerrotype -- a double take, and in its mirrored image across 200 years, you glimpse yourself.
The Photograph : Painted, Posed and of the Moment, NGMA, until March 26
