A new story through the viewfinder
NARESH GULATI
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The city of Ahmedabad was witness to some meaningful photography shows.
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After the long-running show of Raja Ravi Varma's lithographs, the city of Ahmedabad was host to at least five photography exhibitions, besides a competition for young photographers over the past two weeks. Two of the exhibitions came from outside.
While the local shows hosted by the Contemporary Art Gallery and The Pictorialists' Society were to mark the World Photography Day, Alliance Francaise put up Kaushtubha Ray's show this past month-end. The visiting exhibitions, courtesy the Bharat Soka Gakkai (BSG) of New Delhi and Romil Sheth of Mumbai, also came up around the same time. Even as the art of photography has continued to evolve from its earliest days of portraiture or the daguerreotype on the silver iodide plates named after Daguerre, considered the world's first photographer, to the age of vibrant colours; and from the SLR to the digital revolution with APS, the B & W picture seems to be eternal. Its universal appeal was emphasised yet again by Sheth who put on show 25-odd photographs shot by him mostly in Mumbai. Brought by Prakriti Foundation and hosted by L&P Hutheesing Centre for Visual Arts at the Gujarat University campus, Sheth called it Explorations of the Familiar.
Focusing on the three P's viz., people, places and patterns, Sheth's exhibits captured the unfamiliar within the familiar. With an eye for patterns hidden in the mundane, Sheth, an architect by profession, sifts them for the viewer.
Dussehra fair
He picks up a pattern at a Dussehra fair, juxtaposes giant industrial tanks with Ravan effigies on the horizon creating some kind of a paradox between the old and the modern `pollutants'. He shows his prowess also with just a stack of plastic chairs waiting to be cleared after a gathering has left! And that is the case with his numerous other subjects.
The exhibition The Power of One: Gandhi, King, Ikeda was not just about photographs. Featured at Sanskar Kendra by the Ahmedabad chapter of the BSG in collaboration with the Gujarat Vidyapith, this exhibition of illustrated panels put in focus the `themes and pivotal principles in the lives of the three giants of the 20th Century'.
If you went to the exhibition wondering why besides King, a giant like Mandela who also practised Gandhi's non-violence with success, was not featured and why the `white pride' in America continues to campaign against blacks in general and King in particular, you got no answers but came back enlightened about Daisaku Ikeda's contribution to making peace a way of life in this strife-torn world. A believer in the total power of the individual self, the optimist Ikeda claims: "A great inner revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of humankind".
It is not difficult to understand his crusade for disarmament given that he is Japanese. The commonality between the three men besides their adherence to non-violence is that they credit their wives equally for what they could do. The exhibition uses some of the biographical and rare photographs from the chequered history Gandhi and King made in their respective countries.
It was left to the duo of Vraj Mistry and Bhagwandas Bhavsar to offer tributes to the world's first photographer, Jacques Manda Daguerre, with his sketch and a write-up hung at the venue of their exhibition. Mistry and his partner, who put up their exhibition Badri Vishal, a commemoration of the great mountainscape provided by the famous shrine of Badrinath, had expressly visited the place earlier in May. Mistry who hardly feels threatened by the digital onslaught for he sees the mega pixels way behind in matching up to the sharpness of an SLR camera, proves his point with the results on display. Shot with a 28mm wide-angle on a Nikon, the mountainscape is simply breathtaking!
The Pictorialists arranged a slide show on the same day with a range of themes and subjects whereby the animal kingdom, people, places and patterns all came alive in the still darkness of the auditorium at the Ravi Shankar Raval Kala Kendra, the HQ for the Gujarat State Lalit Kala Akademi.
A student of design, Ray somehow prefers to relate to the unglamorous, dingy and timeworn lanes, by-lanes and the dark interiors of lowly houses in not so strange a city. A viewer aptly sums up Ray's work in the visitors book: darkness glows in your pictures!
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