Thinking Small

When photographer Farhatullah Beig,34,turned his camera on children across India,he wasn’t prepared for the contrasts. His ongoing debut exhibition called Child Profiles: Stories from the Interiors highlights some of these differences — a photograph of uniformed montessori students in Hyderabad is juxtaposed with an image of tribal children sitting on the ground for their mid-day meal,an egg,in Appapur village in Andhra Pradesh.

Though the images are banal,a disturbing tremor runs through the exhibition as a viewer comes face to face with children confronting hardship. The work Walls Speak Literacy shows alphabets painted on the walls of government schools in Mehboob Nagar district,used as “standing text book”,while in Srikulam district,a Savara tribal girl carries water from a village community well.

“The idea was to include both the rural and urban set up and show the problems that the plague children,” said Beig,who teaches at Maulana Azad National Urdu University.

The exhibition is on at the IIC annexe till August 20.Contact 24619431