Photography is now as easy as saying hello. You take the phone out of your pocket and thumb a button. But before 2 mega pixel cameras got friendly with the phone and democratised photography, it was a fine art. To salvage it from the plebeian depths it has suddenly fallen into, the art gallery The Fuschia Tree organised a couple of workshops where software engineers and homemakers, 11-year-olds and marketing professionals walked in with their digital cameras to learn to click art.

Its latest exhibition “Delhi: Beyond The Lens” shows the Capital captured by these amateurs who attended two outdoor workshops with photographers such as Bikash Das, Nagendra S Chhikara and Sephi Bergerson. While Das and Chhikara took them through the sights and monuments of Old Delhi, Bergerson led a group on street-food photography. The workshops, says Chanda Chaudhury Barrai of Fuschia Tree, are part of a project called Dilli 6 that covers different aspects of Delhi in six workshops. “It’s not so much about Old Delhi, and has nothing to do with the postal code. We are just playing on the name. The workshops will cover six aspects of Delhi that range from fashion and markets to monuments and architecture,” says Barrai.

In Ready for Tea, a tea boy, perhaps the same age as the 11-year-old Vimanyu Devgan who shot it, balances a set of glasses as the owner looks on bemused. Piece of Luck, taken by 42-year-old homemaker Sudha Sivakumar, shows two men throwing dice on the sidewalk. “I chanced upon these fellows at six in the morning. At a time when people were still waking up, these two were engrossed in the game,” laughs Sivakumar, mother of two. Old Delhi looks splendid in certain black-and-white photographs, especially 27-year-old Akhil Puri’s Old Times that shows burqa-clad women sitting on the ramparts of the Jama Masjid, and Mohit Gupta’s Lazy Sunday.

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