The photographer is always in danger of becoming a voyeur, of crucifying his subjects, clinically, and displaying them like animals in a zoo. But intimacy and compassion rescue him from being an exploiter of the bizarre and involve him in a relationship with his subject. When photos grow from love, they cease to be simply pretty pictures. Instead they become humble offerings from moved observers.
This closeness of spirit and personal trust between the creator and his subject is evident in the photographs of Pablo Bartholomew. In the series of powerful images titled, ‘The Nagas, Marked By Beauty’, Bartholomew rises above easy Orientalism through a very straight telling of the culture and personalities of Naga tribesmen.
A similar passion marks ‘Endless Horizons’, the documentation of Gurinder Osan, Pradeep Bhatia and Dinesh Krishnan’s journey in the Ladakh, Garhwal and Himachal ranges of the Himalayas. Landscape can be a bore but these images move beyond the earth and sky stereotypes. The Ganga in chiaroscuro, fingers of water touching fingers of sand. A tree that looks like a mine shaft in the violence of its shattered, burnt trunk. A squelchy forest floor with fat technicolour leaves and a blue riverscape that twists like a glacial intestine. It’s a whole new way of seeing.
As is Praveen Jain’s hilarious and often outrageous documentation of the power elite’s not-so-powerful moments. Jain’s photographs exhibited in ‘100 And One’ present aspects of politics that cannot be touched by the written word.
Bartholomew’s been travelling to Nagaland over a nine-year period, following in the footsteps of his father who first encountered the Burma Nagas during the Second World War. The stark, powerful colours of the Naga costumes, the sunlight on touch leathery skin and the authority and ferocity of the Ang-the hereditary village chief-grow out of an unprecedented access to fiercely private people. Driving far into the Naga hills, accompanied only by an interpreter, Bartholomew discovered that Baptist Christianity confronts and coexists with tribal animism among the Nagas. "Mine was a personal journey," says Bartholomew, "to reach not the Sanskritic or Vaishnavite India but the Christian and animist one."
The exhibition begins with the spiritual mists of the aged Naga mountains and ends with a mound of Frooti packets at the feet of a children’s choir. There is also the Ang in his skull house in a dark photograph: the shafts of light on his face lending him a threatening yet solitary look. "Years of hatred and hostility is the stuff of the Nagas’ relationship with India," says Bartholomew, "but for me it was a search for meaning, for something deeper than the day-to-day cycle of the media."
A search that’s yielded exceptional results. Of unbelievable strength and gentle mirth in the photograph of an old headhunter blowing a buffalo horn. Of a quiet stillness that makes us mourn for those who died for a cause but were never remembered as in the photograph of Rani Gaidiliu’s death.
For Pradeep Bhatia, photographer with The Hindustan Times, "Our photographs are our homage to the mountains we love." He, along with Osan, a freelance photographer, and Krishnan, a senior photographer with BusinessWorld magazine, travelled to the Himalayas in groups on motorbikes with bare rations and camera equipment and came back with their lives and their way of seeing the world, transformed. All students of fine art, some of their photographs indeed look like miniature paintings, with round mountain stones scattered along a thin delicate path through the trees. Yet, their photos resonate with the silences and vastness of the Himalayas. Wind and light paint down on the mountain faces in Osan’s ‘Brush Strokes’. Krishnan’s lens capture the eerie and supernatural colours of the mountain sky in his ‘Last Light in Har Ki Dun’.
"Where others look for the positive, I look for the negative," says Praveen Jain, photo editor of the Indian Express and recipient of the prestigious Sanskriti Award. Jain goes beyond comment to make individuals seem smaller than the headlines. A deeply somnolent Deve Gowda. A frantic Amitabh Bachchan, late for an appointment. Priyanka Gandhi wiping her tears and touching a photo of her father. Sonia and Jayalalitha in an eyes-firmly-shut-namaste. Jain takes the piss out of it all, as only practitioners of hard news can do.
In the infamous shot of V.P. Singh taking a picture of a beautiful Pakistani woman (its publication made Singh furious), we see the politician as an excitable artist. In another, Shankar Dayal Sharma is rendered a tantrum-throwing infant. "I go to places others don’t bother about," says Jain. "I stay away from the crowd." The crowds, however, are finding it tough to stay away from him.
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