Willam Dalrymple's Photo Book
Dalrymple’s Poetic
Frames
“Black- is a force", says William
Dalrymple quoting Henri Matisse in his latest book of photographs The Writer’s
Eye. “And, anyway, you know, black is the colour of
the light” writes the British author AS Byatt in her book The Matisse Stories. What is it about the monochromatic palette
that lures the greatest of artists and creative minds to render their work in
that mode? “Black and white has a visceral power that colour can never match. The
bleak and grainy photography, dark brooding images marked by a stark
chiaroscuro, has a primeval elemental unmatched quality”, says Dalrymple
inspired by the works of his mentors Bill Brandt, Fay Godwin and Don McCullin.
The exhibition The Writer’s Eye (photographs and
the photobook) opened at Sunaparanta last month and is set to release alongside exhibitions
in Delhi and London. The book-Dalrymple’s first collection of photographs- has
been curated by author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi.
William Darlymple, better known to us as a historian and researcher,
parlays into photography with his set of 60 images that he shot informally with
his Samsung mobile and thereafter edited with the app Snapseed. A talent which
seems to have resurfaced from his time as a young Scottish boy brought up on
bleak windswept shores of Firth of Forth, Scotland, where he clicked frames on
his first Contax 35mm SLR. Stained with
chemicals and fixers in the darkroom, he now revels in the latest technology
which renders photographic services on a pocket mobile with ease and immediacy.
Unplanned extraordinary moments are
captured spontaneously and a more intimate dialogue ensues between the observer
and the subject, when the in-between object piece, the camera becomes small and
discreet.
One is
drawn by the sheer force of the photographic frames hanging on the gallery
walls. The camera can see more than the eye, they say. Therefore a rock is a
rock, but it is more than a rock. It draws you in. Vast expanses taking in the
sweeping vistas of cliffs against a skyline of scattered clouds, a dramatic sky
with dark, billowing clouds suffused in black and white light, a lone dog or a
bird caught in a backdrop of undulating plateaus or an overcast heavy sky, the
eternal jali walls in forts casting webbed patterns of white light, sheer
height of domes and arches captured in majestic forms, women in burquas lining
a paved passage with the last in the row turning back to acknowledge the
camera. The eerie silence of palaces, cemeteries, hollowed passages whispers,
weaving the bleakness of shadowy contours in all that it etches and frames.
The
sensibility of the specificity of light has been used skilfully by Dalrymple to
draw focus at specific points automatically rendering dark drama in its
vicinity. The transient light redefines the surfaces and gives them new
meanings, which change with the shifting light. Dalrymple continues the legacy
of photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, taping the incidence and
reflection of light from varied materials and structures. Deft strokes of the
monochrome light up and obscure, creating a drama of revealing and hiding,
known and unknown spaces. It’s a
classical trajectory of light and dark which resounds with the viewer’s own
core of dark and light. An endless tale
of that is and that is not, taking the viewer into a whirlpool of the beyond
where words die out and silence, a kind of truth surfaces.
He says, “This collection is a
record of a restless year between books, when I took the opportunity to visit
some of the world’s remotest places, especially in Central Asia. Themes
relating to Mughal architecture, the ruins of Afghanistan, the domes of
Golconda run throughout the book - from Leh to Lindisafarne, from the ribcage
of the Hindu Kush to the Lammermuirs and across the rolling hills south of
Sienna. “Dark
granite, silent, empty, bleak mountain ranges with valleys of white snow –
stretched over miles of undulating landscape,
devoid of a human imprint – forceful and powerful in their form – WE
EXIST, WE ARE, WE STAND!” He describes
his visit to Bamiyan – ‘the place of shinning light’ which hangs suspended in
the Hindu Kush – bathed by an illuminating yellow light reflected back by the
salmon-pink of the mountain boulders around it. The pronounced bleakness and
remote quality of his work surprised him too. He admits he didn’t think he had it in him. “There is a tone of darkness and
bleakness to it, which surprised me. I’m not a dark guy — I don’t write bleak
books.”
Dalrymple strings together a range of
affinities in his childhood and teenage years that seem to have left
impressions in his mind about the art. His Calcutta-born part Bengali great grand aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the
greatest photographers of the 19th century who excelled in portraiture and
whose works he leafed through in his family home in the York moors; celebrity
photographers like Fay Godwin whose landscape works he dwelled upon for his
project in college, the grainy dark war photography of Don McCullin, and the
intensity of black and white photography of Bill Brandt – he seems to have
deliberated on his best work - Shadow and Light. But first and foremost, he feels indebted to
Bruce Chatwin the travel writer and photographer for his charismatic
personality and that chance encounter at a lunch which changed his whole life
trajectory and pitched him for the kind of work he has been doing since.
Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, instrumental in facilitating the exhibition
and publishing of the photobook, has curated the show at Sunaparanta. In his introduction in the book, he pristinely
compares the photographs to classical literature per se Virginia Woolf’s works.
That a great book turns you inside out and invites you into a solitude to muse,
reflect, mend and cross a milestone; so do Dalrymple’s frames invoke a moment
of candidness and inner monologue within the labyrinthine neural pathways of
the viewer’s minds. His brilliant stroke of leaving the frames untitled
provides a gap in the visual narrative for the viewer to step in and totally
engage with the art work.
Photographs that slip into your bloodstream and make you sit up,
photographs that stand out in the visual noise around, photographs that hold up
and invoke a different response in you!
If you still haven’t seen them, pop in at Sunaparanta. The photo-poetic alchemy will astound
you!
