Shooting an African princess in her Blahniks!

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"Mom says that I paint well. But that's just being mom." If the fond mother in question happens to be an artist as gifted as Jaysree Burman, you would probably be inclined to sit up and take notice of her opinion. But Riddhibrata, Burman's just-out-of-grad-school son, is charmingly self-aware.

He knows, for one, that his strength lies not in front of an easel but behind the camera. Having studied photography at Duke University in the US, Riddhibrata is now establishing himself as a fashion photographer, doing assignments for international fashion publications (including the British Dazed and Confused) and such.

On the other hand, his arty DNA is exerting itself too, as is only to be expected. As a result, his vision is not all commercial as we find out. Riddhibrata is currently in India to exhibit, for the first time, his kind of works: pictures that are not the kind of Vogue or Vanity Fair stuff that you usually associate with fashion photography.

Instead, here is a more arty take with the photographs echoing the language of Modernist movements and sculpture so much so that it would be possible to see them as two-dimensional sculptures. Riddhibrata himself admits that fashion internationally continues to be influenced by art movements such as Expressionism and and that his own experiments with form and shape can be seen in the same vein.

I see two of his photographs at an exhibition at the Visual Arts Gallery. It is the 18th anniversary show of the well-regarded Gallerie Ganesha in New Delhi. (The Gallerie had launched mother Jaysree Burman as well.)

And while this one is a group show with just two works by Riddhibrata, there is to be a bigger showing of nine shots in Kolkata. The two I see here belong to the same "story"(one story equals eight shots) of an African Princess done some time ago for a magazine in Los Angeles.

Shot in black and white, these are immaculately composed; the deliberate angularity of the figures reminiscent of sculpture, the postures reminding one of the Sphinx/cat figures.

The details are even more interesting. Riddhibrata points out the contrast between the medieval-looking armour "" procured for the shoot from a guy called Dragon (!), whose family used to traditionally make shields and plates for the British royalty before it migrated to the US, and now makes the same for Hollywood "" and the super-chic Manolo Blahnik shoes that the model sports, a tribute to our times, our luxuries.

There are other "stories" too (in colour, some startling, some distorted) that the young photographer takes me through enthusiastically "" work done for various fashion magazines. And he peppers all his conversation with references to his deities: the iconic Richard Avedons, Helmut Newtons et al, gods of photography school curricula, as also other big international names in the field today.

They are clearly his idols even as the Indian aesthetic ("more voluptuous and different") does not quite inspire our photographer at least at the moment. He does acknowledge though that he wants to photograph some of the "living-history" backdrops that are to be found all over our cityscapes unlike in the West.

Arty discourse apart, Riddhibrata is candid about the basic of any fashion photography: "to make models look much leaner, taller, with longer legs and an impossibly long neck" because that's the kind of androgynous look that inspires designers in the West.

"It's not like you can pick up any interesting-looking person off a street," he points out and adds that in India, perhaps the only models who would fit the bill would be Lakshmi Menon and Nina Manuel.

After chatting with Ridhibrata, I am most struck, however, at the scale of fashion shoots internationally. A stint as an intern at the Times of India later, Ridhibrata says he made his way to the US and soon realised what a sea change it was.

He gives you a perspective when he says that "A Dolce and Gabbana shoot", for instance, "is like a Paresh Maity painting in the making". Each light head, fabulously expensive, is studiously put to achieve a tiny effect "" delete a shadow there, add one here.

He goes on to give the example of the shooting of Madonna Rides Again, the stunning portfolio that the celebrated Stephen Klein shot for W magazine, photographing Madonna for the second time. "Just the lights cost $ 180,000," Riddhibrata says. But that's talking commerce.