The one journey that now fills me up with sadness is re-visiting family albums. But I suppose it is a part of growing up; so many people who were an intrinsic part of our life are either not part of it anymore or have gone to live another life. And perhaps growing up also means accepting this change. But thanks to technology, we are the first of the generation who had at least enough access to photography to capture moments that could be frozen outside one’s memory.
I would barter all the colour pictures for the romance and drama of black and white photography on any given day. Or perhaps years of having worked as a journalist in newspapers where I sifted through piles of black and white pictures on a daily basis, have trained my sensibilities and aesthetics. Even as a books editor and author, I have opted for black and white especially where people needed to be portrayed.
I recall with deep affection occasions when I was barely six or seven, when photographer S. Paul would come home on my birthday to take black and white pictures of me blowing the candles of my birthday cake — thanks to the fact that he was my father’s colleague at The Indian Express. I also remember pillion riding with Manish Swarup through the streets of Chandni Chowk for a photo-shoot with Ustad Bismillah Khan, photographing the Goddess Saraswati personified as M.S. Subbulakshmi in Chennai and capturing the great dancer and guru Kelucharan Mohapatra in Bhubaneshwar with Arko — all in black and white. And these cherished pictures are stuff memories are made of.
Today, when cameras are almost as ubiquitous as the cellphone, taking pictures is a part of lifestyle. Lamentably too, many artistes are using the medium to take short cuts to art, by using pictures that they morph with some amount of computer wizardry and call them mixed media works. Art teachers will tell you that students are most reluctant to do figurative drawings, and sketching will soon be a lost art, thanks to the use of the camera and computers.
However, pure photography is a genre that holds tremendous interest. The ongoing show of Gaurav Singh’s photographs “Emotions Obscured — Making Silences Speak,” too has some poetic moments that are an interesting amalgam of some of his experiential spec-trum. There is a romantic streak in his works that runs through the entire show. And the best part is that he doesn’t resort to tricks and wizardry, but relies on the camera as a medium and lets his thoughts do the talking.
It is his ability to see beyond the obvious that is the fine thread that connects the works. The masculine in art is on the fast track in this age of the post-modernist. It sees, absorbs and then imbues its form and content with its own reflection. It transfers the immediacy that is its response to life as it rushes past. And this capturing the present continuous moment from the point of view of the male gaze is what makes this reflective instant, a challenge.
Gaurav’s works have a thoughtful quality heightened by the stark black and white works. There is repose with an air of brooding that hovers over his canvas. And yet it is not gloomy, but instead beckons the onlooker into the depths of its being as he allows that glimpse into its core. The male gaze, it has been proved, is different and so is its ability to record and recount its perceptions. The concerns are more individualistic rather than shared.
The psychological reasons are deep-rooted to the point of being primordial — it is this world-view which in turn impels the creation of this aloneness in art. The romantic lyricism in Gaurav’s work has the feel of fineness and delicacy of flowers unfolding — silent, but stunning in effect.

Dr Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator
and artist