Building an Image

If walls could speak,those at the Colosseum in Rome would bear testimony about the lavish level of entertainment of its residents in 80 AD Europe. The first frame in Sanyam Bagha’s photo-exhibition zooms in on the Colosseum from various sides,revealing its seating like in the movie Gladiator. “There’s nothing else that explains an amphitheatre of this size and magnitude,” says Bagha,a final-year student of the Chandigarh College of Architecture.

Amongst the other 40 photographs that are part of the photography exhibition on European Architecture that brings a bit of Europe to Chandigarh,are images of museums,churches,railway utility centres and monuments,shot over a span of one year when Bagha had gone to Switzerland for his internship. “Every weekend I used to Google about cities with historical structures and then travel by train to click them,” Bagha recalls. The photographs capture phases of Europe right from Roman and Gothic to modernist architecture. It captures the journey of 20 th century European architects like Walter Gropius,Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier,who pioneered the modernist movement. “They embraced concrete,glass and steel in their geometric creations,consciously rejecting the past,” says Bagha. His image of Notre Dame du Haut,a church in France made in 1955,is devoid of ornamentation. “Made of exposed concrete,its was amongst the first of its kind then,” says Bagha.

The exhibition is on at Punjab Kala Bhawan till October 16