If you are wondering what could be common between fashion designer Malini Ramani, adman Swapan Seth, film actor Sushma Seth, model Kamal Sidhu and the always-in-news Sabrina Lall – well, they are all subjects of a new body of work, which photographer Bonny Hazuria likes to call “painted photographs”. A fashion photographer whose entry into art seems much like an afterthought (she was 43 when she made her debut in a group show last year), Hazuria’s solo show of painted photographs titled Between Heaven & Earth was an instant sell-out last week in Delhi. It’s an accomplishment every artist dreams of but Bonny considers this as only the beginning of her art journey.
“I was fascinated by photography very early in life with my father’s work playing a major influence in the years of my apprenticeship,” she says. Accompanying her fashion photographer father Kitty Hazuria on shoots while she was still in college, Bonny soon found a place in the same industry, becoming extremely popular with a clientele that needed personal portfolios. Fashion industry was only just beginning to boom and this provided Bonny with several opportunities to experiment – the first being her immediate connect with faces, something that wasn’t being done at that time.
“In the 90’s, I realized that faces and people were my forte. Soon, I found myself drawn to the sublime in the ordinary and I gradually moved away from the glamorous aspect of fashion photography towards art that reflected my personal growth. What draws me now is an inherent beauty, a spiritual calm and an unbroken peace amidst the everyday chaos of human life.”
It’s natural, thus, that nearly 40 photographic works in the current show reflect a fine balance between the spiritual and the earthly, between what is human and what is godly. Graceful imagery is made even more resplendent with the technique Bonny employs. Using her training as a painter (she also works on canvas regularly), she imparts the same painterly skill to her photographs. Bonny’s photographs are ‘painted’, although in a digital medium, enhancing the image’s effect to create a completely new work from the original. In some works, she makes collages, while in others it is a single image, all layered with textures and paints that have been created digitally, with special lighting effects to create the final image.
“My work reflects the state of mind I have been in for sometime that has caused me to photograph and paint the subjects in a certain way. The serenity and grace, whether in a human form or nature, makes me create the harmony between the physical and the spiritual,” she explains, adding, “The choice of my technique is a self-creation and that was the biggest challenge. To choose the right tools and programs which would have all the possible colours and brushes to play with is what always is the fun part,” she says. That she has mastered the technique of painting and texturising the clicked picture is evident from the fact that a different effect or result emerges in each work depending on her sense of colour, perception and expression.
Her recent works also reflect her personal journey of self-discovery – be it in landscapes or portraits. For instance, in a series of works on Prague titled ‘Reverie’ and ‘Sublime’, Bonny aptly brings out the old world charm and the mysticism of the Czech capital which has remained intact since the Second World War. Using her colour palettes and lighting techniques to make the photographs more ethereal, Bonny shows her version of a fairy-tale world that exists in Prague!
She says: “Prague’s history is an epic story in itself. Inhabitants of the city have witnessed a series of events that could change a landscape forever – Nazi control, communism and then capitalist democracy. But the old buildings are still as beautiful and dreamlike, it’s a fairyland!”
A similar fascination with technique is evident in her portraits of monks of Dharamsala and more so, of people from Indonesia. “Indonesians are simple people who glow with an inherent divinity, visible despite the place being one of the fastest growing tourist destinations of the world. I took these photographs during a temple ceremony.” Spirituality is evident even in her photographs of bare bodies – with some as swirling forms as in Minx and Nymph – that have been “abstracted”. Here, Bonny uses the effect of textures of fabrics and her favourite colours to lend it a spiritual grace that a nude photograph could never depict.
But the body of work that stands out, not merely for its innovative treatment but also for those who feature in it, are painted photographs of personalities like Sushma Seth, Sabrina Lall, Malini Ramani, Tisca Chopra, Kamal Sidhu and Swapan Seth among others. The super glamorous Malini Ramani acquires a meditative mood while Sabrina Lall, who has mostly been portrayed as the girl-next-door comes alive as a diva. Adman and art collector Swapan Seth says of her work, “When Bonny recreated a photograph of me with my wife using this mixed-media technique, I felt this was the real person. Her work brings alive what lies behind a simple picture.”
But simple is the hardly the epithet that can describe Bonny’s painted photographs. What is evident, on the contrary, is the complexity of an artist’s mind that knows no boundaries!