The Statesman - Delhi
03/03/1999 , By By M Ramachandran
Using black and white film a photo-artist can capture certain moods and emotions such as gloom, weariness and helplessness more forcefully than in colour. And this is what Diwan Manna, a young photo-artist from Chandigarh who exhibits his works at AIFACS gallery, focuses on. His black and white images take the viewer beyond the frames. Avoiding colour while representing things which we see around is a step towards abstraction. This makes Diwan’s black and white photography more abstract than the colour photography.
Diwan has taken picture of dreadful silence, solitude, and helplessness felt in the European metropolisis and of the weariness of people who work in sooty and shabby kitchens in his native place. His lenses peep into the depth of a space emphasizing its horizontal structure. Wheather it is a railway tube in London, the Louvre Museum or a street, Diwan Looks for the spatial effects that makes one forlorn. It is not the persona in the photographic composition but the space that imposes the mood. For instance, a beggar who makes a city-street alive with his saxophone becomes an image of solitude, in one of the photographs.
Other than simple techniques of image-manipulation through chiaroscuro, Diwan does not temper with technological and darkroom possibilities of photography. That limits these works from outdoing the convention of naturalism. But the existentialist view of the photo-artist transforms the images of human beings and the works of art as metaphors of shudder and death.
That is why a photograph such as the one that shows a lonely man who sits on a chair in the gallery where Rodin’s sculpture The Kiss is kept, or the view of an installation of Boltansky that speaks of death, does not have any feature of documentation.
