‘Touching Light’: Exhibition celebrates analog photography, pays tribute to its practitioners

New Delhi, Aug 27 (PTI) An image of Muhammad Ali Jinnah - cigarette poised between his fingers and irritation etched across his face - locked in a heated exchange with Mahatma Gandhi, is frozen forever in time.

Captured by photojournalist Kulwant Roy, the iconic undated photograph is one of many that are markers of Indian history at an ongoing exhibition at Museo Camera in Gurugram.

‘Touching Light: A Prelude to the Bicentennial of Photography’ by Aditya Arya pays homage to analog photography in India, capturing some of the most iconic people and events since the late 1800s that helped shape the collective social and political consciousness of the nation.

The exhibition begins with a brief introduction to the initial days of photography in India, with pioneering Bourne and Shepherd Studio that captured India of the day as well as portraits of rich and commoners alike in the 1860s.

Italian photographer Felice Beato arrived in India in 1858 to capture the scars of the 1857 revolt in 160 photographs of Lucknow, Allahabad, Kanpur, Delhi, and Meerut - creating a powerful visual history of the event that was to be the first death knell for British Raj.

According to Arya, the exhibition is an “ode to the pioneers and contemporary masters of photography”.

“...whose vision and craft have shaped India’s visual history. The idea is we come from touch and feel times, we come from a time when images were created in the darkroom where we washed the film and enlarged the print. So it’s a celebration of analogue time,” he told PTI.

The exhibition brings together rare historical photographs, including the ‘Carte de Visite’ from Bourne & Shepherd Studio, albumen prints from the ‘People of India’ series (1850s-1860s), and ‘Beauties of Lucknow’ series by Darogah Abbas Ali (1874).

It also features works by 28 contemporary Indian photographers, including Akash Das, Avinash Aggarwal, Avinash Pasricha, Bandeep Singh, Dinesh Khanna, Fawzan Hussain, Harbans Mody, Hardev Singh, Jayant Shaw, and Kulwant Roy.

While Roy documented the Indian independence movement closely and captured the likes of Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru and Patel, Parthiv Shah recorded the lives of weavers at a textile mill in Ahmedabad in 1983 who struggled with poor living conditions, diseases, and caste bias.

Shah’s series ‘Working in the mill no more’ captured the weavers’ narrow living quarters, the cotton dust that caused fatal lung disease byssinosis, and caste bias in the mill that limited work opportunities for Dalit weavers.

The exhibition also features Avinash Pasricha’s iconic photos of Indian classical artistes.

A curtain of his works featuring the likes of M S Subbulakshmi, Bhimsen Joshi, Birju Maharaj, Begum Akhtar, and Kumar Gandharva divides the gallery space between Bandeep Singh and Mala Mukerjee.

While Singh’s digital pigment prints feature Bharatanatyam dancer Navtej Singh Johar, Kuchipudi dancer Swapna Sundari and actor Naseeruddin Shah, Mukerjee’s work across the wall is a collage of photos of actor Nandita Das, Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, and contact sheets of the “Earth” actor.

Contact sheets, an essential tool in analog photography, are a physical print of the film roll. To create a contact sheet, the negatives are placed directly onto photographic paper and exposed to light, resulting in a grid of small, positive images.

It was a prerequisite for Arya to only include photographers who have kept their negatives and prints safe over the years.

“It’s very difficult to find photographers who have kept their negatives and prints safe. These are the people who have kept each and every negative and print safe. So it’s a celebration also to encourage photographers to preserve their negatives and silver prints,” he said.

Apart from the vintage photos of the 19th century, the exhibition features photos developed at Museo Camera by Arya, who believes the negatives are the genetic code of an image.

“The gene of any image, the genetic code of any image lies in its origin, which is the negative, or an egg albumen print. So I told them I need to see your original negative and they gladly shared,” he added.

Other photographers part of the exhibition are Mahesh Bhatt, Neeraj Priyadarshi, the NK Dasappa Archive, Prabir Purkayastha, Pradeep Chandra, Pradeep Dasgupta, Prashant Panjiar, Ram Rahman, Rohit Chawla, Saibal Das, Serena Chopra, Sondeep Shankar, Sumiko Nanda, the Thiagrajan Archive, and T. Narayan.

The exhibition pulls out Prabir Purkayastha’s mesmerising landscapes of Ladakh, featuring its winter frost, Stok chortens, residents of Nuh village, and the famous murals of Basgo Monastery.

From Pradeep Chandra’s pictures of Shabana Azmi and Anand Patwardhan on a hunger strike to Sondeep Shankar’s photos of “Bandit Queen” Phoolan Devi surrendering in February 1983, the expansive exhibition covers a large gamut of themes that photojournalists of the time recorded in their cameras.

Be it Prashant Panjiar’s close captures of dacoit Maikhan Singh and his gang in the Chambal ravines of Madhya Pradesh or Akash Das’ fashion photography in the early 90s, the exhibited photographs stand as precious fragments of memory – a testament to both artistic vision and historical record.

The exhibition, a precursor to the bicentennial of photography in 2027, will come to an end on September 29. PTI MAH MAH BK BK