Father,Son & Camera

Photographer Ram Rahman’s latest solo exhibition at the IIC Annexe,which opened on Thursday evening,is not just an artistic endeavour but an effort to use

photography to revisit some of the nodal Bauhaus Modernist structures of Delhi. Rahman has juxtaposed his own photographs of the buildings in their current state with these classic images taken by his father,Habib Rahman.

“Unfortunately,the architecture that replaces the Nehruvian vision is what I

call the ‘Karol Bagh aesthetic’ which is

retrograde,tacky and does away with the simplicity,confidence and symmetry of the past,” says Rahman,who showcases his photographs taken over the last 35 years with the vintage photographs taken by his father,who was also the architect of many of these buildings.

This section of the exhibition is mounted like an Agitprop campaign,with news clippings and images mounted like digital posters on flex banners,and vitrines containing the actual old photographs,booklets on architecture,correspondence between his father and heads of state and old maps and town plans.

The rest of the exhibition consists of a set of colour gelatine photographic prints that act as portrait tributes to the workers restoring Humayun’s Tomb,a suite of colour images,mounted on white thermocouple plastic board that captures the old city at night,and a black-and-whites series from his 1997 body of work titled ‘Divine Facades’ that underline religious tension played against the backdrop of the city’s religious buildings.

“The restoration of the Humayun’s Tomb,Sunder Nursery and Nizamuddin Basti complex,by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and ASI is my comment on Destroying the New and Restoring the Old,the opposite of what is happening at Rabindra Bhavan. The portraits of the workers are a tribute to those who do the actual work,” says Rahman belying Marxian ideology that glorifies the dignity of labour.

The “City by Night” images are mounted on white thermocouple plastic board and titled “Old Delhi at Night”. On the one hand,it depicts the time of Eid-ul-Fitr,the festival of breaking of the fast. Shots of the “Muslim” area of the old city known as Dharampura gali have been juxtaposed with the “Hindu” area,Chawri Bazaar during Diwali. “I wanted to shoot the old city at night since I can capture that digitally. I also wanted to tease out the parallel celebrations of the two communities that have lived in harmony for years in one of the most densely populated areas of Delhi,” says Rahman.

The show is rounded off by two interesting images from his father’s archive. These are of his mother,Indrani,posing at Qutub Minar. “This was a postcard that I enlarged because my mother was one of the first dancers to actually pose at a historic site in Delhi,before it became a trend,” comments Rahman on the pixelated vintage work. The second set of images is an enlarged-to-poster-size contact sheet of the last two frames his father shot of kathak dancers Durga and Devi Lal at the Hauz Khas Madrassa in 1970,before he fell into the lake. “He broke his spine and remains a paraplegic,” says Rahman,wrapping the history of his beloved city into his own tragic personal narrative.

As a part of this exhibition,there will be a talk on July 26 at 6.30 pm. The exhibition is on till July 28 at IIC Annexe.

Contact:24619431

(With inputs from Nitika Bhatia)