It’s an unwinding caress with the eye of the camera. As if the dark skin, the red lipstick, and the cream of the sensuous fabric, the faded wall as backdrop, the streets unfolding into shut windows in a shadowy Italian by-lane, they, together, are compelled to make a silent symphony with the female nude, often without faces. Their bodies move out of the frame and the architecture, as lucid and languid as a lazy sunlit afternoon trickling inside a wine bottle on a table covered with a white cloth.
‘Prabuddha Dasgupta: A Journey’ deserves this return journey to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Delhi not only because this iconic, non-conformist photographer spent his childhood on the grounds (his father was a director here), but also because he travelled zigzag, not following the straight line of clichéd commercial photography, proving his own genius and the ephemeral beauty of the sublime texture and tangibility of his images. Even when the image is that of a nude, angular back of a woman, trapped in lazy reprieve.
You can travel with him inside Paul Braganza’s residence in Goa (2005), with a glass of ‘Honey Bee’ in the bartender’s hand, to the aching series called ‘Longing’, with old-fashioned surrealism marking the empty space with half-eaten food, like an exotic installation, a pack of Marlboro and a lighter. The absence of human beings, often, is only an uncanny reminder of their presence.
Yes, except when he enters nature, as in ‘Ladakh’, with the waters flowing through white peaks etched like Paul Klee’s geometric lines, not always in synthesis with sand-dunes, flatlands, landscapes, mappings. And, yet, etched with horizontal and vertical lines, the stoic peasant woman’s face in Ladakh (1995) becomes a landmark. Indeed, in her glazed eyes lies his camera.
(This photo exhibition is on till November 22, except on Mondays and national holidays)
Text by A mit Sengupta, Associate Professor, English journalism at IIMC, New Delhi
Photos courtesyNational Gallery of Modern ArtNew Delhi