Photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta: NGMA hosts retrospective

What defines longing? The yearning to return home? The wait for a tiring bus ride to end? The desperation to make love? Or the sheer thrill of being caught in a game of hide and seek?
For late photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta perhaps, longing lay in all of these.
90 pictures in all, from his final series "Longing" along with photographs clicked during his short-lived life of 55 years form a part of an exhibition, "Prabuddha Dasgupta: A Journey" inaugurated last evening at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) here.
"Longing," Dasgupta's journal of memory and experience, was based on the everyday - family, friendships, places known, spaces occupied, journeys remembered - revolving around the core of a pivotal love affair.

With an oblique, non-linear narrative, the work seeks to evoke through the selective memory of personal experience, a journey of the viewer's own.
"His photographs act as a voice capable of luring our senses, instigating the viewer to put his mind, his eye and his heart on the same wavelength. What reinforces these thoughts is the sense of a strong composition and rhythm that is explicit in the images," Rajeev Lochan, Director, NGMA said.

He was in the process of publishing "Longing", when he unexpectedly passed away in 2012.
Bits and pieces from every facet of his career as a photographer, both fine-art and fashion, are on display at the the show.

Born into a family of artists in Kolkata (1956), Dasgupta grew up in an atmosphere of creativity in the company of painters, musicians, dancers, writers and filmmakers.
He also spent several years living on the grounds of NGMA, where his father, Pradosh Dasgupta was the director.
A bunch of photographs from the time he spent in Ladakh in 2000, shows the cold desert being shot in the rare monochrome light, bringing out deeper and lesser told stories of the peasant and nomadic life of the land.
"There is a sense of lingering familiarity that transcends the atmosphere created by his images. The photographs facilitate a distinct connect between the viewer and the photographer," Lochan said.

He is said to have brought to photography a bold individualistic sensibility, which fetched him a place among the most distinguished photographers in the country.
Pictures from "Women," his controversial collection of portraits and nudes of urban Indian women also form a part of the retrospective.
The collection was a result of his realisation that Indian women as subjects of photographic representation were never seen as anything but exotic models of attractiveness.