Curatorial intervention that marks ‘Lens-ing It’

The concept of the new show, entitled ‘Lens-ing It’, evolved over a period of time in the mind of its curator Johny ML who found the use of photography in most art forms he tackled so pronounced that one could not have wished away such presence and prominence.

However, as rightly observed by the curator, the treating of photography as one of the aides or tools for doing something else posed an interesting problematic before me and it was during the same period I noticed how so many galleries in India and elsewhere started taking an added interest in photography, photomontages, photo collages and digital works based on photography.

The curatorial essay by Johny ML elaborates: “As far as my understanding goes, lens based artists are not those people who are ‘good at machines’. They are artists with a purpose and perspective. While they adopt strategies in framing their images, perhaps more than a studio based artist, they face challenges of a different sort.

Between the momentary-ness of the image or the posed finality of the tableaux and the photography artist, there lies a series of spaces that have to be negotiated within the span of a click by the artist. Perhaps, for a studio based artist, he or she gets more time to deal with it.

In this project at New Delhi based Ashna Gallery, my curatorial intervention was to gather a ‘series’ from each photography artist. By a ‘series’ what I mean is a set of photographs taken in one go or over a period time in which the photography artist continue to be led by one particular aspect of his visual, ideological and aesthetical searches.

Perhaps, this focus of the artist could be in a way an extension of his/her philosophy and aesthetics as reflected in their oeuvres. But by the curatorial focus, this one particular ‘series’ becomes a point of departure as well as arrival, which could supply a clue or a key to extensively analyze the works of the photography artist in question. Interestingly, all these photography artists in this show have been consistently following certain ideological as well as aesthetical aspect of photography throughout their creative career so far."

(Information and essay courtesy: curator Johny ML for Ashna Gallery, New Delhi)