J J Valaya turns lensman with his debut photography show.
The sixties were swinging. The seventies stylish. And the eighties… What was the one remarkable thing about the eighties? Confused fashion with plastic earrings and baggy trousers? And equally confused films and film music? “Come to think of it, there really isn’t much about that decade which is worth holding on to,” says designer J J Valaya sitting in his glitzy showroom-cum-office in a mall by the busy Delhi-Gurgaon road. But he has one special memory of that period — about a particular barter deal which he struck with a friend as a young college student in Chandigarh.
“I had a detachable mini-steering wheel, which could be fixed on a Maruti or a Fiat car. It was quite a hit in those days and made you feel like you were driving a sports car,” he says. He exchanged it with a friend for a camera — a manually-operated Pentax. The friend is now a millionaire running an automobile business in the US — "I steered him in the right direction," grins Valaya — and the successful couturier is now a budding artist, a photographer. The affair which began with the camera and was secretly nurtured through his years as a designer will be revealed on February 15 when Valaya holds his debut photography show in Delhi, to be followed later by a show in Mumbai on the 24th.
The exhibition, ‘Decoded Paradox’, is Valaya’s tribute to Delhi, its people, its past and present. Valaya has tried to capture the city, which he made his home 22 years ago, as the melting pot of histories and cultures that it is.
In the 24 black and white photographs which will be on display, Valaya says he has tried to juxtapose contemporary Delhi with architectural relics like those from the Mauryan period, the age of the Mughals and the days of the Raj. “The contradiction,” says Valaya, “lies in trying to infuse the two separate periods of time into a single frame.” Each work has a staged element representing the city’s feudal legacy set alongside the existing Delhi that lives on and off the roads. “It’s a portrait of the static with the alive or the dynamic,” says Valaya.
In one of the pictures, the staged element, or the “subject”, is designer Sumant Jaikishan seated at Agrasen ki Baoli located off Hailey Road in Connaught Place with bandwalas in the background. Other subjects include artist Subodh Gupta, actor-model Rahul Dev and Valaya’s own embroiders. They are dressed in costumes and accessories from Valaya’s and some select private collections.
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The project took a year to evolve. Seven to eight months were spent on research and the remaining on the streets of Delhi with his camera, now a Canon. “But I still have my original Pentax,” he says. Valaya plans to bring out six limited editions of each archival print. Valaya, who had at one point of time enrolled for a course to become a chartered accountant before a call from the National Institute of Fashion Technology brought him to Delhi, says he has always been interested in fine arts. As a young man, the 43-year-old designer would spend hours painting huge canvasses. He would also shoot his own collections because he says he found himself spending too much time trying to explain to the photographers how to click the way he wanted them to. He is happy that photography as an art is now becoming popular in India.
Some time later in the year, Valaya will be off to Dufftown, Scotland, to be with a group of artists participating in the three-month Artiste in Residence programme at the Glenfiddich distillery. The whisky, which has been holding the programme for artists since 2002, is backing Valaya’s foray into a territory he hasn’t ventured into earlier.
Since 2009, Indian artistes have been part of the Artiste in Residence programme.
Valaya says he is nervous, just like the way he was 18 years ago when he started out as a designer. “But it is now or never,” he says as he prepares to bring his affair with photography out of the closet.