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France in frames

Mumbai-based Leena Kejriwal captures moods, people and places through her lens

VIGNETTES OF LIFE A photograph by Leena Kejriwal

Photography as a medium of artistic expression has become a privileged activity among many artists desiring as they do to play with light and life.

Leena Kejriwal, a Mumbai-based artist's photographs offer vignettes of her life in France while on an Artist-in-Residence programme initiated by the cultural service of the French Embassy in India. She has reticently captured the mood and ambience of the place, those moments of pleasure and truth. Her subject is the ordinary populace as they go about their daily activities — lighting a pipe, eating breakfast, epicurean activity in a restaurant, menu placed on the door of an eatery, etc.

Her photographs have dominant sepia tones that give them a sentimental feel, simultaneously evoking poetry. The life within each frame engages viewers in a dialogue, thereby making the collection dynamically interactive. Her eye has caught those moments, sometimes sequentially, creating the illusion of a moving image. For instance, the five small portraits capture the eagerness in the eyes of a woman as she approaches her meal. Interestingly, Leena does not confront her subject directly; rather she is a peeping tom of a different order and texture. Her subjects are unveiled from behind glass windows and doors, back rooms of a café, etc., fixing them permanently on her light sensitive canvas with candour and intimacy. It is this directness that defies calculated approach and makes her photographs warm and inviting. As a matter of fact, there is nothing hierarchical in her approach to her subject, simply fixing life, as it goes by in its own spaces.

With interesting textural and decorative details such as the tiles of the floor, the timeworn wrinkled skin, the fur of the street dog, the warm brown crust of the bread and the vine, which offers not grapes but branded wine and glasses, she enhances the compositional value of her frames.

The aura of the photographs is enhanced by the artistic and dexterous choice of framing.

The exhibition is on at the Apparao Infinity, 7, Wallace Gardens, 3rd Street, till September 15.

ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT

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