The Bluest Eye

Reputed ad photographer Swapan Parekh’s new show reveals some highly personal work, says NISHA SUSAN

Connecting the dots Photographer Swapan Parekh at Photoink, Delhi Photos: SHAILENDRA PANDEY

IN CONVERSATION, Swapan Parekh alludes to the annoyance that iconic photographer Raghubir Singh faced from casual viewers who felt, “I could have taken that picture.” He alludes to it in the context of a danger that he, too, could face. The photographs in his new show Between Me & I, do not possess prettiness, drama or a National Geographic- once-in-a-lifetimeness to instantly humble the viewer. Instead, the show shares Parekh’s way of seeing, an eye trained by 25 years of photographic work in every genre — what he calls a “photographic reflex”.

The show is dedicated to his parents: his father, the celebrated photojournalist Kishore Parekh, who died on assignment in the Himalayas when Parekh was 16, and his mother, who died a few months ago. “I picked up a camera when my father died. It was my shield, a way of dealing with life.” On a wall, set apart from the other prints, is a photograph of his feet, close to the feet of his mother’s body laid out for her funeral. In its quiet use of colour and fragmented bodies, it is in perfect unity with the other images. More than the others, it speaks directly of a life where the camera is a crucial link, a constant companion. All the photos in this show are unstaged, taken impromptu, often between assignments for advertising and the media, which have given 42-year-old Parekh an exciting and lucrative career.

Parekh is best known for his award-winning press and advertising photography in black-and-white, a dramatic medium he calls his legacy. His new work does not provide instant gratification and one wonders how much some images would work in isolation. But, as a whole, the show is bound to satisfy a patient viewer, for whom patterns will resonate.

For simple satisfaction, your best bet is the profile of a white bull, seemingly levitating, sparking every myth about bulls your collective consciousness has accumulated. Much of the show is about absences and missing links. A child’s face is obscured by party decoration. A girl stares into the middle distance from behind a piece of blue cloth as disembodied arms emerge from behind her. A child with a disproportionate look of loss reaches vainly for a coathanger inside a locked car. Just as one imagines the clothes that would hang on a coat-hanger, so with many of Parekh’s images one’s instinct is to connect the dots, imagine the missing trunk of a tree. The most interesting images are those that defeat intuition. The quickly glimpsed man’s profile seems like Gandhi or a Brahmin with a choti, but he’s neither. The choti is a wire emerging from the wall, which you transfer like an epithet to his baldness.

Parekh started early, and his work is familiar to people across generations. Before he went to study photography in New York, for a while he trailed Raghu Rai, his father’s friend, at work in India Today. Rai was only one among dozens of legendary photographers and photojournalists who were at the enthusiastic opening of Between Me & I this weekend. SN Sinha, former photo editor of Hindustan Times, said simply that he enjoyed how fresh Parekh’s work seems. “You get bored seeing the same kind of work.”

Delhi-based photographer Sanjeev Saith, who has been following Parekh’s work, doesn’t hesitate to use the loaded “refined” to describe it. When Parekh picked images for this show, he threw out all those whose locations were easily identifiable. Parekh was determined that his newest viewers should not get that sort of nudge. No sadhus in Varanasi, East European cities, overcrowded living rooms — nothing with an overpowering history. “His is a very special eye that has studied the form more than the content of photography,” says Saith.

SAITH ALSO calls the work cold, the coldness being descriptive of its “blue-ishness” rather than pejorative. “These are images about the abstraction around people’s lives, the geometry that surrounds them. Though you don’t see too many people, you sense people, lurking.”

Parekh confides that he does not care whether he sells. (The edition is limited to eight prints, priced at Rs 80,000 each.) For now, the art market is welcoming of work that’s loosely being called personal. “It was called personal because, in the past, you shot socks or banians to make a living. You roamed the streets to take pictures that satisfied you, but did not pay. Now, it’s inverted. What you get by shooting yourself or your family for a gallery show pays a million times more than a commercial assignment,” says Saith.

Saith is just as intrigued by the context developing around Parekh’s work. “Is he ahead of his time? Is he of the moment?” Saith wonders. One can only wait and take some pleasure in watching.

(Between Me & I is showing at Photoink, MGF Hyundai Building, 1 Jhandewalan, New Delhi till November 20, 2008)