THE MAN IS A BIT OF everything. Photographer, sometime painter, actor and wanderer- and full-time obsessive personality. Those who know Diwan Manna, a Chandigarh-based photographer who won the Lalit Kala Academy’s and the All India Fine Art & Crafts Society’s national awards for photography this year, aren’t surprised with anything he does. For instance, his current combination-fascination with women and death. “You may never see death but sometime begin imagining so much about what it actually could be that it becomes a living reality,” says the 38-year-old. “And I have tried to express that reality through a woman’s body.”
The result is Walking the Dead, an exhibition of 24 photographs which are styled to look more like paintings, currently on at a West Yorkshire art gallery in the U K. Organised by the Kirkless Metropolitan Council; it opened on August 10 and will run till September 22. This is Manna’s second exhibition in the UK; in 1993, his 17 photographs on violence were exhibited in Wolverhampton during the South Asian Visual Arts Festival, and later put on as a critically acclaimed solo `Light House Touring Exhibition’.
Manna has over the years moved from black and white photography to transposing photographs of models on painting of local Chandigarh artists. Nor surprisingly, he is often panned for giving in too much to gimmickry, but Manna defends his work saying it isn’t just a brush with darkroom tricks. “I take a flight (Manna-ism for his take-off to fantasy-land), prepare a set and then capture it, he says. To evolve an equation for death, sensuous and sickening at the same time came out in a recent 10-day burst of shooting. For those who think it’s all bunkum, the boy from Bhatinda has a ready repartee: Don’t bother. Some of those who do, pay up to Rs. 25,000 a shot.
