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Ashvin Mehta, photographer of repute, on his driving muse as an artist
My childhood was quite abnormal. I was shy and introverted, too serious for my age. Metaphysical questions (`Birth, death, disease, suffering, old age' Bhagwad Gita 13:9) plagued me since the age of 12. They kept me restless and made me a social misfit. Perhaps this drew me to nature -- the sky and stars, rivers and mountains, birds and trees. Nature, as well as inanimate objects, responded and, so to say, revealed their secrets. Now at 68, my inner landscape has all changed, and the maps have been redrawn. The hollows of mental agony have been filled and the mountains of doubt and confusion levelled. I have tasted the fruit of solitude and reaped the harvest of persistent enquiry.
I have been branded a nature photographer, but if you consider my oeuvre there are many themes which will not fill that slot: `Happenings', `Bicycle', `Intimate Cityscapes', `Contemplative Colour' and `Jantar Mantar'. The`Human Form 1973' is also not nature photography, although it treats the body as landscape.
My constant endeavour in nature photography is to transcend the obvious, the local, the specific and the immediate, using the same parameters which define a landscape. It is like a man who has fallen on the ground and is trying to raise himself by taking the support of the ground.
Many factors contribute to this transcendence, but the major ones are the quality of light and the overall composition or juxtaposition of mass. Of course, there is an unknown and undefinable factor of chamatkruti (miraculous), the launch pad -- for both the artist and the viewer -- to leap into the realm of timelessness, and break the last barriers of the familiar, the known (pratyaksha).
My forte is abstraction, which, according to some, has given my photographs a `painterly' dimension. But there is more to abstraction than meets the eye. Abstraction is not all confusion and uncontrolled chaos. It has its veryspecial inner order and has immense potential to express the adbhuta, the joyous and the sublime. True abstraction is a movement towards the unknown and the limitless.
`The task of art is to make things visible so that they may become objects of reflection.' I cannot agree more with S H Raza. I believe any good photograph has to have a contemplative quality about itself. Absence of human beings does not necessarily make a photograph contemplative. The reverse is also not true. The classic images of Cartier Bresson or Alex Webb or Raghu Rai have a contemplative quality even when they portray unpleasant human situations. The fashion photographs of masters like Horst are also no exception.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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