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LENS EYE

Photo: Christopher Taylor

symmetry of grandeur: The stairway inside the Standard Chartered building in Kolkata.

Colonial architecture is photographed quite frequently, sometimes as reminders of a burdensome past, sometimes as a treasured legacy. It is the sheer artistry that sets Taylor apart, the exquisite details enhanced by the use of the 4 x 5 inches camera that allows front and back adjustments and keeps his verticals straight. That technical manoeuvring is of vital importance to Taylor’s work, as he explores the diverse possibilities of space, whether peering down a narrow alleyway on Bentinck Street, the walls almost bearing down upon the viewer or offering a bird’s eye view of the limitless expanse of the city from atop a building close by.

One of the enduring images in the exhibition is that of the winding staircases and the spatial magic that Taylor weaves with them. The cover photograph on the invitation card, for example, shows the stairway inside the Standard Chartered building in Kolkata, a central vertical flight almost dividing the photograph into two neat compartments, each containing further flights in a neat, angular juxtaposition. Elsewhere, as in the staircases inside Tagore castle, such angularity is set off against the roundedness of the balustrades, Hellenic statuettes peeping from the corners while the viewer stares into the bottomless abyss of the stairwell.

The specious waste of colonial era grandeur is best represented in the depiction of the city’s Mackinon Mackenzie building, mounds of rubble occupying the foreground as the skeletal remnants of a magnificent dome haunt the background of the frame. Taylor captures the Stock Exchange, but his focus is not on the frenzied activity but on the urban squalor of its back lanes, the utter dessication of life contrasted in the viewer’s mind with the prosperity that trade connotes.

Taylor’s individuality lies in the way he composes his frame — the view from a nook, or through a casement to highlight the unusual and lend an air of mystery to the familiar. The office of the Bible Society at Esplanade in Kolkata, for example, does not stand out by itself, but Taylor captures its terrace, juxtaposing it with a commercial billboard looming in the distance, imparting meaning and thought in the process. What is significant is that his frames always concentrate on moments of repose, an empty Coffee House, devoid of the bustle, or an empty Royal Seaman’s Club in Mumbai, without the bonhomie.

The minute details also add to the subtle humour evident in the collection and Taylor draws generously from the little laughs that life always provides. As in the man we see sitting all hunched up on the pavement, gazing wistfully at an umbrella or the view inside the police commissioner’s office when it is empty, with the once mighty colonial officers beaming from the neatly secured frames on the walls. Or it might be the bizarre astronomical theories etched on the city walls by K.C. Paul, an urban legend on its own. The one Taylor has photographed, for example, reads: “there is no life on the Mars [sic], because Mars is not stationary as the Earth, in the space”.

When Taylor decided to revisit history, he chose Kolkata as he found its atmosphere to be “hauntingly familiar”, as “enough remained of the Empire’s second city to be a living testimony to the colonial era”. His pictures are all taken on available light, and printed in the conventional manner on fibre-based paper. Through that age-old technique, he has highlighted the variegated strains of the much-reviled colonial age, whether through the rich opulence of the Tagore’s drawing room or the eternal adaptability through which a grand colonial structure like the Writer’s building, now the West Bengal Secretariat, can be co-opted as our own.

Christopher Taylor on why he decided to photograph the two cities and his other current projects.

Principally because my initial idea was to investigate the legacy of British colonial power, and Calcutta was the colonial capital, and Bombay the commercial centre. Also, both cities were largely British creations — Delhi, for example, has a much longer history. I had visited both cities in the 1980s, and had been struck, particularly in Kolkata, by a strange feeling of familiarity. At the time I was living in London, and there seemed to be strong links between the two cities. The architecture and planning of the city centre was in some ways similar to London, but more than that, I sensed a link to a Britishness of the past. The city somehow had seemed locked in the past. About six years ago, I read a book very critical of the colonial era (in Africa), and at the time the second Gulf war was building up, which I thought had neo-colonial echoes. It occurred to me that it would be interesting to investigate the colonial legacy in some way, and I had the idea to photograph the interiors of the largely administrative buildings that dominate Kolkata city centre, as the visible demonstration of imperial power. I found more than enough material in Mumbai and Kolkata so did not look elsewhere.

I work in black and white because I prefer it. I find colour a distraction. I try to keep things as simple as possible, and eliminate distractions, so black and white was a natural choice. Also, it enables me to be completely independent. The equipment I use is old (50 years) which I buy cheap second-hand. I have been using a large format plate camera (5 x 4 inch negatives) as the best tool for photographing architecture. I print and develop films myself so the costs are reduced. So I can be independent. I also prefer the graphic quality of black and white photographs.

I wanted to avoid photographing people. The subject was interior spaces, and the ambiance within buildings. People in the images automatically become the focal point, which was not my aim. In addition, people tend to date an image. My idea was to create an ambiance of suspended time. Also, with the equipment I was using, exposure times were often very long (sometimes half an hour), so photographing people would have been technically difficult.

I have started a project in China with the same large format camera, but in many cities, and exclusively exteriors. All Chinese cities tend to look alike, the old architecture has been destroyed, and cities have been totally rebuilt in a rather sterile way. I became interested in this idea of uniformity, where each city could be any other.

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