Foreword: Brazilia - Chandigarh, Catalogue of Exhibition by Stephane Herbert
Brazilia - Chandigarh Exhibition
11/26/2008 , By Diwan Manna
Foreword
If I were to describe Stephane Herbert in short, I would say he is a wanderer at large. During his wanderings he is looking to pluck images out of civilizations, cultures, places and monuments - geographically thousands of miles apart, carrying with them traditions and centuries of life lived and forgotten - with care, concern and sensitivity in a contemporary idiom.
He looks at this world in relationships. In the present exhibition of photographs - of architectural places and buildings – for him architecture or town planning is not a singular entity; it is people in connection and rhythm with earth, sky, light, trees, clouds and buildings. In his work, buildings or monuments acquire meaning when they are peopled: they are not beautiful peaces of architecture alone - they become beautiful when seen and visited, homed by people - people of myriad shades, races, places and cultures. He looks at these buildings in a continuum of civilisational evolutionary process. He soaks, in his vision, forms and surrounding nuances of the people of various nationalities and then presents an image -representative of that place, its people and their time in its entirety.
The combination of these elements and his own personal experience of travels to different parts of the globe like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, India, Guatemala and Brazil etc. - gets transformed into images that are powerful, fragile, ephemeral and liquid as the world itself. In the picture of children playing in the glowing winter evening light of northern India under the huge open hand of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, below the similar playfulness of clouds above; or that of the gigantic dark cloud above the dome- shaped monument in Brazilia with golden light and human figures with their shadows - make us feel the presence of time or perhaps its absence. The beauty, importance and momentous character of these images etch in our mind the capabilities and possibilities of the explorations of human spirit.
Likewise a lonely figure squatting against the tree-trunk, under its shade with Gandhi Bhawan framed between two trees in Chandigarh and that of a lonely girl against the patterned blue wall and shadows above and beneath her - sensitize us to the fragility of us humans dependent as we are upon nature and to also our resolve and capability to supplement it with our creations.
In his pictures buildings become living organisms: growing, breathing and changing with time, climate, and seasons, with people who inhabit them or pass through them - giving them temporary, momentary new life.
Stephane presents us with simple, straightforward, quiet, real, transparent truth and spontaneity of each moment without interfering with the flow of life as destined or designed by nature.
He appreciates the spaces, spaces within spaces, volumes, scale, and play off light on and in the areas sited by the architects in juxtaposition with other transient but inseparable elements.
He looks at buildings, structures, nature, trees, sky, clouds and people like a musician in tune with himself and his instrument. He seems to be recording the symphony that is being played but actually he is the creator of that symphony.
His images are free-flowing, unburdened by settled codes and genres or other unwanted jargon. His photographs are like a rivulet passing through valleys, plains, cascades- quenching the thirst of those who happen to taste its multilayered experiences, entertaining and, at the same time making one stop, pause and wonder at the beauty of the world we are living in, making us aware of the importance of each and every moment.
While doing so he also brings in focus the natural as well as the man made beauty of the cities of Chandigarh and Brazilia.
