Howrah High Jinx- Pabli Bartholomew
India -
Photographs create a frame of the world and the photographers place within it, a personally composed fraction of time – a re-enactment in the theatre of memories. This can be said of Pablo Bartholomew’s incessant search for the self in this exhibition – his own identity illustrated once again through a sense of place. Following a series of displays on his formative years in Mumbai titled Bombay: Chronicles of a Past Life, we take a step onward into Calcutta, the home of his grandmother and a city in flux: caught between a colonial past and the post-independence haze of modernity.
Bartholomew speaks of the camera as a ‘shield’ and a possessor of great power, with the ability to make History into Legend. At the same time he treads two gritty registers of life – an outsider looking in, a position that offers insight and relative objectivity; but also an insider with the authority to calibrate images as personal biographies of city life, visualised through dense black and white images shot on film. Propelled by an inner-compulsion to capture varied sections of society, its marginalised inhabitants with craft and dexterity is like gauging its shifting pulse, a second that may eke out gradually over the years – a veritable lifeline. In achieving this, Bartholomew’s narrative of Calcutta is not simply evidence of a bygone era; not merely an ephemeral encounter between a photographer’s aesthetic and his subject nor an apparent documentary of the streets.
Chinese man and girl with worker Tangra Calcutta-c.1978
- See more at: http://www.emahomagazine.com/2013/01/howrah-high-jinx-pablo-bartholomew/#sthash.VwBNbr5r.dpuf