As I descend the stairs that lead you into the basement set-up that is Seven Art Limited Gallery, I find, to my immediate left, a low stool on which three magnifying glasses have been placed.
I pick up one. It’s relatively fancy. You press a button and it lights up. There’s light enough in the gallery, so I don’t feel the need for added illumination. As I’m about to hold the magnifier to the first photograph mounted on the wall, I feel the sudden rush of music.
I recognise the soundtrack instantly, like an old familiar tune from my lost adolescence. It’s Philip Glass’ trademark composition from “The Hours”. It lifts me, elevates my being. For a few priceless seconds, I lose myself. I forget where I am. I forget that I’m here to review Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi’s recent body of work, which has colonised these walls. I nudge myself back to reality. I hold the glass against the frames and try my best to mask my utter disbelief at the sheer mediocrity of each composition.
It is in moments like these that I wish I were a photographer. Not because I know I have a better eye than Shanghvi, but rather so I could articulate exactly what it is that makes each image so utterly unexceptional. For some time now I’ve been trying to wrap my head around all the positive reviews and publicity that Shanghvi’s show “Postcards from the Forest” received since it opened. Words like “melancholic” and the “vicissitude of loss” have been floating around like flies in summer heat. Only one reviewer dared to suggest that the photographs were soppy in bits. It made me wonder. Not just about the veracity of Shanghvi’s claims to being a photographer, but also about our culture of critique that allows such bosh to masquerade as art, no questions asked.
The press release positions the show as a “moving meditation on love and the threat of its sudden retreat”. The “postcards” come across as nothing short of sentimental. Grief is a painfully exquisite thing. In the right hands, it can be transformed into poetry. Anne Carson’s “The Beauty of the Husband” is a case in point, as is Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings the Blues”. Both are compelling arguments as to how the act of creation can be at once therapeutic and transcendental. Both works of art move you because in the hands of these artists something as universal as pain and heartbreak becomes so intensely private, individual and yet relatable.
Shanghvi lost a friend and decided a move would do him good — so move he did, from Mumbai, his home town, to Matheran, a forest town. “From this solitary reflection emerge nine eerie and evocative photographs accompanied with text ‘stories’ that summon to mind the narrative genius of artists like Sophie Calle and Duane Michals” — this is the part of the press release that is like a shot to the head for any discerning aesthete. Shanghvi’s show doesn’t even touch the raw wound whose half-formed scab Calle managed to rip off in “Take Care of Yourself”, a show she engineered after her lover broke up with her over email, ending his letter with the words that form the show’s title. Or even in Calle’s “Exquisite Pain”, another body of work she put together in response to a lover who reneged on a promise to meet with her at the appointed hour on the appointed day in the appointed place: a room at The Imperial Hotel, New Delhi.
What the reception of Shanghvi’s “successful” show does seem to suggest is that it is not a keen eye or a persistent engagement with the act of looking, or a consistent dialogue with the subject in question, that will make a good photographer out of you. In the absence of any innate talent, strategic marketing, good connections and a Philip Glass soundtrack are all you need. The rest is immaterial.
The writer consults for Zubaan.
Every week, Eye Culture will feature writers with an entertaining critical take on art, music, dance, film and sport
