A double take on life

A group of photographers capture life's vignettes on camera.

Fine art photography has acquired a new respectability lately. More and more galleries are willing now to give wall space to photographers, even little-heard-of names "" no doubt prompted by interest from a growing breed of buyers and collectors.

A lot of what one gets to see is, of course, run-of-the-mill, or use the same visual language that Raghubir Singh or Raghu Rai forged decades ago. But there's a lot of work that's really exciting and photographers are making intelligent use of the camera's ability to freeze the here and now, playing around with frame, range, angle and light at this show "" no, not in Mumbai but in Delhi.

Atul Bhalla, painter and sculptor, shows three works, shots of the Yamuna by the light of dawn. "I am extremely conscious of the performative within the act of taking the photograph," says the artist, introducing his works, "[which] enhances the experience through taking and presenting the picture again and again. But of course the picture changes no matter how similar it may look".

Consider "Yamuna Morning III" as an example of this agenda. It is a series of long-shots taken in quick succession, almost like a cinema reel, of a group of four people emptying something into the river. Arranged in three rows of five shots each, the viewer's eyes naturally move from left to right trying to read a story into it. But this is where the phtographer intervenes "" the pictures are arranged not according to time sequence, inviting the viewer to engage with it at a level that's a little more complex than the staightforward narrative.

Owais Husain plays around similarly with perspective in his works "" especially in the B&W quartet of photographs of water pipes in a park. For Ravi Agarwal too, photography is performance. But here, the photographer is himself the performer "" of a somwhat lurid skit "On the impossibility of being feminine", the theme of his 31-picture series.

Ayesha Kapur uses the medium to open up the space between reality and illusion/representation. Her photographs of mannequins in a shop-window, juxtaposed with reflections of people passing by on the street outside, are a self-conscious, albeit clever statement on the merging of identities, and the scary bio-genetically-engineered future that may await humankind.

In comparison, Karan Khanna's photographs of staircases, windows, verandahs, little nooks by the window may seem far more conventional. Khanna seems happy to simply highlight how the "source of light and the direction of its beaming" and the shadows cast by "objects, happenings and situations outside the picture" affect the object being photographed. They make very pretty pictures, of course, working on the contrast of pigments and textures.

Nature is the inspiration for the remaining two, Anna Tully and Anand Seth "" only the scale of their vision differs vastly. While Seth does beautiful panoramic pictures of undulating dune formations, Tully is inspired by Blake's "world in a grain of sand" dictum.

A foot of shoreline somewhere in Spain, a Scottish sand dune traversed by insects, the cracked mud in an old puddle "" these are the subjects that excite this phot-journalist. But seen up-close in Tully's beautiful B&W prints, they look like the undulating creases of a mountain range or a desert run over with the tracks of nomads, highlighting the patterns that recur everywhere in nature. Reality, after all, is a performance too.