Bringing back the bygone

The dark room, in a conventional photo studio, is a bit of a romantic space. For the photographer, it is at once a secret sanctuary and a laboratory, where he dips a piece of paper into a developer tub and patiently waits for his image to magically appear. The defining moment is when the first trace of the image marks its presence on paper. The digital age has done away with much of the romance of photography. Photographers like Raghu Rai and Dayanita Singh work in digital (for practical reasons) and analogue (for the love of the medium) formats. Others like Max Vadukul do not veil their disdain for the digital. Vadukul once said, “Digital photography is like speed dating, it happens so quickly that there is very little time for romance.”

The ongoing exhibition at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery — Al Revelar , meaning ‘to reveal’ — pauses on the romantic moments photography offers. Three artist-photographers — Natalia Ludmila, B Ajay Sharma and Fernando de la Torre, assisted by Nancy Verma and curator Julia Villaseñor, got together to workshop and rethink the near-forgotten processes in photography. The exhibition was put up after working on the idea for a month and a half.

Al Revelar explores photography through its various techniques. Photographs developed through cyanotype (cyan-blue print), silver salts and gum bi-chromate are a part of it. “Making photographs the old way, no doubt, involved chemistry and science. But it also had the element of chance or happy accident,” says Sharma, a Delhi-based artist who hails from Jharkhand. “Because of that element of chance, all images I have created using the hypo (emulsion of sodium thiosulfate), salt print and gum bi-chromate methods are mono-prints. They can be reproduced but no two images will be the same.”

Simulations of his photo-lab are positioned alongside an installation of mono-prints of missing children. “The images of missing children and forgotten techniques of photography came together harmoniously in my mind since they both deal with the idea of loss and time,” he says. “It was an interesting process to create negatives out of existing images and then print them,” he observes. Apart from the technicalities, the poignancy of the images of missing children is accentuated by their fading quality — some of them are negatives, others vague sepia tracings that only hint at the identity of the missing child.

Thirty-four-year-old Ludmila approached the concept by re-discovering the connection between painting and photography. “When old techniques are discovered in a new and personal way, it reveals a mystery that is unique and leads you down a new creative path,” says Ludmila, who lives and works in New Mexico. Searching for the differences and similarities between Indian and Mexican culture, Ludmila created her own ethnographic archive of images, which play as a slideshow at the exhibition.

“The way the outside world looks at India has changed — from the exotic to the contemporary. The archive of images measures some of that change,” says Ludmila, who also created a series of cyanotypes on monkeys in Rishikesh. Titled ‘Jal’, they comment on the degradation of our natural environment. “In an age when images can be created using old techniques like cyanotypes as well as the click of a cell phone, it is the intention and reason behind an image that makes it art.”

Fernando de la Torre’s work is about embracing the exotic, whether it is the cyanotypes on the holy men, idols festooned with flowers or seductive digital images of circus performers, in particular, the fire-eaters.

“Memory is an important part of human civilisation, which is why one must go back to the basics both technically as well as subject-wise. Not only have I experimented with cyanotypes, a method used way back in the 1800s, but I have also tried to seek out those parts of India that are untouched by time,” says the 36-year-old who moved to India as a diplomat but has since been drawn to its cultural wealth.

“I hope we can take this project to Mexico, since there is much that we share culturally and it will be good to exchange ideas and imagery,” says del la Torre.

While this exhibition is a must-visit for photography and history buffs, the endeavour to rediscover and make relevant old methods of photography is an ongoing one.

Groups like Goa Center for Alternative Photography (CAP) are keeping alive not just old printing techniques but also alternative methods of image production, such as the pin-hole camera and the camera obscura. So too are workshops and residencies like ALTlab and exhibitions like Saltprint and symposiums like the ‘Wanted Series.’ “The struggle to keep alternative photography is an ongoing one,” says PA Madhavan, a founder of Goa CAP.

( G eorgina Maddoxis a Delhi-based art writer)

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