Indian Express Sunday Magazine
08/29/1998 , By Balpreet
The Camera flash can hold a lot. Especially if it’s your muse and you happen to be Diwan Manna. But this painter-photographer from Chandigarh hardly even wields a camera, though nowadays he’s spending a lot of time in front of it, what with a reputed television network doing a full length feature on him.
So, what’s this about him and his camera? Does he wake up one fine morning and goes to work with a camera around his shoulder? “No, no.” he laughs. “Some of my best photographs have been shot with borrowed cameras.” The cameras may be borrowed, but the experiences that guide them are his own. “Sometimes a picture takes form in my mind first,” he says. “Then I get down to setting up a backdrop, finding the right actor, getting the right expression, the light…. It’s like making that hazy image happen.” He’s transcending, in other words, the thin dividing line between painting and photography.
So, he always wanted to be a photographer? “No,” he says emphatically. “It just happened.” After schooling at Bareta, Punjab, he took admission to the College of Art, Chandigarh. A five- year brush with the painter’s tools, a sketching pencil and a camera was enough to make Manna decide that only the camera could match up to his level of impatience.
But how does `art’ fit into all this? “Expression,” he says. “It’s my endeavour to elicit a reaction to my images and transmit the viewer into my world of impressions that guided those images.”
His media too have been varied. “As a child, I remember playing Ram in a Ramlila. Then there were workshops conducted by Badal Sircar that gave me immense latitude of expression.” The actor in him also found expression in Khwaja Ahmad Abbas’s film based on G S Chani’s play, Disturbed Area.
Cinematography was yet another discipline he wished to flirt with. “Somehow it hasn’t happened,” he says. “Exploring the varied genres of cinema, though, remains a passion with me.” It is when he stops watching others do things with their lenses, that his own camera takes over. But he doesn’t let just the camera do the expressing, for he’s a multi-media man.
From blending photography with acting, to painting images in acrylic with discovering techniques of combining filters, Manna keeps springing surprises even as he romances the camera. And it shows in his work – you don’t know how to describe it: is it a photograph or a painting?
“I don’t propose to create pretty images,’ he says. “I aim at expressing my perception of things, of the actuality around me.” Not surprisingly, then, his first portfolio, which he put together in 1980, was all about the peons in his college – the idea was to show how distanced we are from others even when we’re together. Then take his series on violence, which “was all around me-in Punjab, in Kashmir, in the North-East… it was my way of expressing my pain for those affected by it.”
How much of a social purpose can an artist achieve? Art on its own may achieve very little. It can, at the most, touch and mostly those who understand the medium. But if these few can give a working shape to the artist’s message, a lot can be achieved.”
Any favourite photographers? “Oh yes! I love Raghu Rai’s work,” he gushes. “The American photographers Cindy Sherman and Peter Joel Witkins also impress me. The photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who shocked the world with his bold work, including a series on men making love, was excellent.”
Manna is currently working on a series on the relationship between the road, the feet and the moving wheel. Earlier, he had done a series titled `Waking the Dead’, which is scheduled to be exhibited in New York in early 1999. “Death triggers off so many doubts, fears in us,” he says, explaining his forthcoming project. “I am trying to understand it not only as an eventual reality, but also as an idea.”
For the much-awarded artist – Manna has had the Lalit Kala Academy award and two consecutive All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society honours coming his way in the recent years, death is just of the realities he must probe, with his camera and his canvas. And for a mind as fertile as his, it isn’t the end of the road. There’s more of him to come yet.
