Poetry in Pictures

As you enter the time-weathered building of Triveni Kala Sangam in the heart of Delhi – its top floor also home to veteran artist Rameshwar Broota for nearly four decades – nothing prepares you to confront the monumental photographs that hang outside his office room. Step into his office, and more of these intricately textured pictures with the minutest of detail poring out of each frame, lie neatly stacked against the otherwise bare walls. It’s his work of over four years, he smiles. And now, some of these selected photographs, nearly 20 of them, will be displayed in an exhibition titled “This End to The Other” at Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam.

Some would perhaps remember his previous, and the first, outing with photographs four years ago. “The scale of these photographs is much different. The exhibition is much more earthy this time,” says Broota, 69, “there are far more open spaces and fewer objects. The emphasis is on the details, just the way I have in my paintings.”

And detailed they are indeed. A 7- feet long untitled photograph of a dried up river bed, which Broota shot near Spiti in Himachal, contains a landscape that is barren yet stunning. Devoid of any human element, what captures attention is the satire with which the artist captures a donkey and a tractor in the same picture, both isolated from the landscape they belong to.

Construction overdrive in his favourite land of Himachal seems to have inspired some other works as well. A top angle photograph of a mountain side in Himachal, cluttered with houses, is so fine in detailing that it appears almost like a miniature painting. A completely different photograph, titled Where Does The Ganga Flow, of a chaotically developed Hardwar, taken once again as a top angle shot, show his knack of capturing both the overt subject and the hidden story.  “It is not easy to enlarge a shot to show this kind of detailing where even the smallest crevice of a hillside, finest texture of a rock or the weathered door of a distant house can be seen in a long shot,” says Broota, often referring to how rigorous his experiments with photography have been.

Having started photography at a very early age with a box camera, Broota has upgraded technology in both the camera he now uses and the computer that helps him create the required compositions, especially for the mammoth sized diptychs and tryptchs.

Even in this show, some of the most evocative photographs titled What Lies Beneath which are tight close ups of human hand and feet, showing every line, crease and wrinkle adorned with just a drop of water and in some cases, blood! “This could be earth, an animal skin or even a rock,” he says of the graphical series of works which almost blur the line between what is human and what is not.

Renowned for his strong masculine forms in paintings which on close examination are actually immensely intricate monumental drawings, Broota now imparts a similar sensibility to his photographs as well, although with a twist. The human forms in his photographs – like the diptych titled No Dog, No Elephant, No Mouse in which a half-covered faceless human body dreams away as a plane zooms off into the horizon above her window, or one in which a man looms large over a cluttered city of Greece in a work titled No Man, No Horse, No Parrot – are superbly juxtaposed with aerial shots that defy regular compositions.

Even though Broota says that he has moved away long time ago from making a political or social comment through his works – recall that his earlier Gorilla series of paintings were about corruption and decay – it is not hard to figure out these photographs somehow talk about environment and relationship between humans and nature.