When artists such as M F Husain took to the camera

An exhibition of photographs by leading artists such as M F Husain and Krishen Khanna reveals a new aspect to the idea of art

M  F Husain’s fascination with the camera began as a child when he saw his father’s studio portrait being taken. Finally, in 1937, a friend and he bought a box camera and set up a street studio. “We had backdrops, curtains, even a bookshelf. We were doing quite well... but my partner ran away with the camera,” he laughingly told author Aditi De in an interview. The flourish that he showed with the paintbrush through his career was replicated with the camera too, when in 1980, armed with a Nikon camera, a wide-angle lens and two rolls of Kodak colour film, Husain cleverly juxtaposed larger-than-life film hoardings in Madras with street life. So you have lurid posters of Lonely Girl watching on as a mother walks by with a sleeping child on her shoulder or autorickshaws on the road looking almost toy-like when dwarfed by gigantic hoardings of a matinee idol striking a melodramatic pose. Shot over two days, these images resulted in the seminal series, Culture of the Streets.

Curator Vidya Shivadas brings Husain’s lively account of the streets to public view yet again as part of the exhibition “Off the Record: Meditations on the Photographic Image”, which is on display at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. Husain’s photographs share space with images by eight other artists such as Krishen Khanna, Atul Bhalla, Anju Dodiya, Susanta Mandal, Juul Kraijer, Babu Eshwar Prasad, Showkat Kathjoo and Charmi Gada Shah. “The idea was explore the diverse ways in which artists have approached the medium of photography, addressing the nature of perception, memory, absence and time. The camera is used to investigate these philosophical and aesthetic dimensions,” says Shivadas. It’s quite a heady mix for the viewer as the exhibition prompts you to think of photography in several contexts — its relationship with painting, it’s avatar as a performance art, an art installation and more.

The performative aspect comes through clearly in Anju Dodiya’s work, Smoke Through a Keyhole. Each image of the artist — be it her encountering art works in a museum or gazing at a child on the beach — is paired with her paintings. “I have used the ‘self’ to create a narrative but it’s not autobiographical. The narrative is fictional — of my imagination,” says the artist. There is an interesting relationship between the small-scale images and the large painted mounts that they have been framed within. “The idea is to see the whole space, not just the image. Also, you are beholding an image that is so tiny that you have to go closer. It will trigger an internal voice within the viewer to slow down and start absorbing,” says Dodiya, who feels that most of us spend our lives with the “non-moments” — opening cabinets, going to the market, et cetera. “My work is a philosophical take on that. It is about turning inwards and being one with those moments too.”

Babu Eshwar Prasad's Counterfeit, archival pigment Picture by Vadehra Art Gallery & Babu Eshwar Prasad

  Each image has a certain story, a history attached to it and that adds to it’s appeal. Not everyone knows how Krishen Khanna’s iconic crow series came into existence. It was the late 1960s and Khanna was immersed in a series of experiments at his Delhi studio. “He was interested in knowing what happens when a flat image collides with a three-dimensional object such as his easel, a door, window or a canvas,” says Shivadas. So, Khanna converted his studio into a black box and spent three to four years photographing projections of images on his Hasselblad camera. And that’s what resulted in the projected images of the squawking birds in The Crows Around My Studio (1969). There is also a nine-foot photo montage, Iron Ore Mines, Bailadila (1970), that Khanna made when he visited the iron ore sites in Chhattisgarh on the invitation of MMTC. He worked with the 400 slides that were taken on the site, projected them onto various surfaces using three projectors simultaneously and then photographed the result.

“I was interested in early experimentations of modernist figures like Husain and Khanna. The series done in the late 1960s and early 1980s respectively can be re-read as very important projects that offer another kind of precedence to the works of contemporary artists in the exhibition,” says Shivadas. “Another really interesting work is by Susanta Mandal, who deconstructs the apparatus of the Magic Lantern, an early optical projection device, used in the Victorian period. Mandal examines the tentative image produced by the shifting and overlapping lenses. The fragile, fleeting photograph is recast as a sensitive poetic portrait of layered subjectivities.” Mandal has been experimenting with the still image for several years in series such as Hard Copy. “I have created the programme in a way that the two images stop at a juncture that is not planned. So, somewhere I am planning and somewhere I am inviting an accidental interruption,” says Mandal.

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“Off the Record: Meditations on the Photographic Image” can be viewed at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, till November 25, 2015