Illuminating India: Photography 1857 - 2017
The show uses
three pivotal dates to tell the story, the Indian Mutiny in 1857, independence
and partition in 1947 and contemporary work. My favourite section was the one
on the Mutiny as it looked at the birth of photography in India and used that
to tell the story. I was fascinated in how quickly after the events that the
demand for photographs of the main sites appeared and the idea of ruins
tourism. It reminded me of the how the same things happened in Paris after the
Commune.
The show was full
of snippets of fascinating stories such as that of photographers Robert and
Harriett Tytler who not only photographed the site of the Mutiny but were
responsible for selling the contents of the Red Fort buying a crown and two
thrones themselves which they later sold to Queen Victoria. Also Helen Messinger
Murdoch who, at the aged of 51, started a tour to photography the world and was
an early pioneer of colour photography.
I thought the
1947 section was a bit thin however I was interested to see how Henri
Cartier-Bresson came to India and took some of the famous images of the death
and funeral of Gandhi and Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of the exodus.
I liked the fact
that contemporary work was represented by three photographers of which I liked
Vasantha Yogananthan’s “Myth of Two Souls” inspired by an epic poem using lines
from the poem as titles for contemporary pictures. I loved a picture of a
cricket pitch with a telegraph pole in the middle. The phone lines radiating
out from it made it look like the glass on the photograph had broken.
Closes on 22
April 2018.
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Guardian
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