On exhibit in Delhi: Prabuddha Dasgupta’s and Dileep Prakash’s intimate portraits of nature

When German artist and photographer Karl Blossfeldt pledged his entire life to studying and photographing plants, the world had seen nothing like his visual exploration and examination of them. In the early 1900s, he built a homemade camera and lens, which magnified up to 30 times the plants he wished to photograph. His incredible collection is testimony to a purely scientific curiosity, but the photographic outcome is not just science. The images are detailed and sensual, both expressions perhaps not reserved for botany at that time.

At PHOTOINK, New Delhi, the late Prabuddha Dasgupta’s ‘Anatomies’ and Dileep Prakash’s ‘Sleeping in the Forest’ are on display together as two solo exhibits. Dasgupta’s untimely death in 2012 left a vacuum in the understanding of his delicate portraiture, especially of women. ‘Anatomies,’ conceived posthumously in collaboration with his Estate, is an incomparable celebration of his exploration of the anatomy of nature. The 26 prints on display are a poetic engagement of his conversations with a subject that is far away from his work on fashion, and women. Much like Blossfeldt’s close-ups, Dasgupta’s photographs work around the fragility of botany.

Perhaps not willed as just that, the photographs reveal a very sensual portraiture, leaving the viewer amazed at what plants might possibly provoke. Dasgupta’s style is easy, like an insider moving in familiar territory with a gaze that stops at nothing when photographing the alluring anatomy of otherwise mundane plants. It is impossible to not let the mind sway into a self-exploration of the body when looking at his stark black and white images. The erotica scratches at the surface, the imagination, not.

Dileep Prakash’s series portrays an intimacy partial to the geography of darkness, aided only by the intrusion of moonlight. Intrigued by India’s colonial past, Prakash’s ‘Sleeping in the Forest’ is the culmination of a ten-year long project on British-built rest houses in the forests of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Using long exposures, his camera finds winding forest trails, sometimes in the company of humans, sometimes in the company of moving strips of starry skies. The grandeur of the forest is intimidating and lends its invitation to only those who are unafraid of its uncertainties. The rest houses are relics of the past, leaving behind a complex footprint in modern India. Their haunting, abiding presence is silent, not invisible.

To see Dasgupta and Prakash traverse such precise distances in their portraiture is admirable, knowing how hard it is to weave one’s thoughts faithfully into the definite finality of a photograph. The works follow each other like siblings, one consumed by the interior, one thrown outside of what is the common womb.

WHAT: Exhibition of Prabuddha Dasgupta’s ‘Anatomies’ & Dileep Prakash’s ‘Sleeping in the Forest’

WHEN: 11am- 7pm, until March 17

WHERE: PHOTOINK, A-4 Green Avenue Street, Vasant Kunj

NEAREST METRO STATION: Chhatarpur