Hindustan Times - Delhi-LEISURE THE METROPOLITAN
03/26/1997 , By Saurabh Shukla
SHOTS OF LIFE
Diwan Manna’s pictures capture the mood of the modern man, a confused descendant of home sapiens (wise man) who dies not knows what he wants in life and what he is heading for. The recent exhibition of his photographs in the Capital in black and white was about men and women in a hurry.
These women and men are so crazy about speed that their faces go hazy. The pictures catch the feet on an escalator in an underground railway tube, as part of the hectic traffic in a mega polis or the feet peddling a rickshaw. Between their footsteps and themselves falls the shadow, a blankness which marginalizes them. Tiptoeing on their margins they are distanced from the center of their existence. They experience the sensation of their movement, its tempo, its pace, its panic in its ritual and routine character and what it reduces them to – an amorphous mass. They become faceless.
The 37-year-old bearded photographer, a recipient of the National Academy Award in Photography in 1996, says that the collapse of the emotional bondage between human beings, the triumphant march of materialistic culture and the belief that everything has to be earned and not gained through spiritual and other related methods provided the background for his photographs. “There is no linkage between two human beings from the emotional point of view and the modern man has become lonely within himself,” he says.
Manna beautifully captures the facelessness and the inescapable correspondence between loss of face and absorption in speed. This facelessness can be seen in his photographs in which men and women are pacing up and down in the high-walled museums. What really strikes is the spatial telescoping of the eternity of art works and the fragility of existence of those viewing them. The viewers become the view and the art objects the viewers. Says Manna “Shouldn’t we stop for a while and think what we are doing and we are heading for in the light of the lifestyle which we have adopted today?”
However, while capturing the cooks in a dhaba or a small restaurant, the faces in the photographs are intact in spite of, or because, of their sweating brows. The pictures exhibited in the exhibition were about speed, alienation and dehumanization and Manna successfully conveys the fact that life is becoming mechanical, opaque and depersonalized.
The suave photographer is now working on the theme “Death”. “Various facets of death, those who are going to die, whether it is accidental, natural or is caused by a disease, is the theme,” informs Manna.
However the crowning glory in Manna’s photography is an innovative style, in which acting by professionals in the background of paintings is captured in its true sense. He is probably the world’s first photographer to do this. His exhibition of such photographs was organized last year in the art gallery at Dewsbury Museum in the United Kingdom.
About these photographs, Manna says that the phenomenal upsurge of violence in all walks of our emotional, social and political life is the starting point. “I try to come to terms with the insidious and unrecognized forms of our brutalisation and the degradation of the sense of life and honour within ourselves,” he points out.
