The Tribune: Chandigarh - India
11/18/1992 , By BN Goswamy
Varying Rhythms
For more than a hundred years now, the arts of painting and photography have been eyeing each other sometimes from a distance, sometimes from very close quarters. As if in a mating dance, they now come close, now move apart: dazzling each other with their plumage, tantalizing, provoking, and merging. Countless painters have used photography to their own ends; photographers, on the other hand, realizing the limits of their own medium, have often tried to approximate to the condition of painting in their work. To this ever changing relationship, Diwan Manna’s photographs, now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Panjab University, make a distinct, innovative contribution.
What he has done, in the group of coloured photographs on view, is to place one or two figures in front of a painting – he has mostly used Raj Jain’s, still, stable, evocative works – composed the arrangement very carefully, and shot it in colour, but completely altered the colours of the original while printing, partially through the use of negative, partially through dodging and burning, in part through a very refined use of filters. But the way the image comes out, figures in negative – green or blue faces, light-edged, floating and ethereal – the colours of the original work of art transmuted even when not printed in negative, it becomes a very different entity, endowed with another life, turning into some kind of a painting done with a camera. These photographs glow and burn with intensity, with a peculiar sense of urgency. The works teasingly touch reality on the one hand, and transform it on the other. Visually, it is very stimulating. But also thought provoking. The rough-hewn brick walls of the paintings turn into metaphors of a crumbling order; superimposed, receding bench-legs take on the aspect of a furnace; meandering vegetal forms appear like ghostly, synthetic organisms that come from some extra-terrestrial soil.
In the black and white photographs that fill the other two galleries in the show, Mr. Manna shifts his focus perceptibly, and seems to enter a different world. The rhythms here are varied, for what engages him – and the viewer – here are seemingly routine sights; cycle rickshaws with tattered sunshades, drivers cooking a frugal meal between rides, “halwais” and their half-clad assistants stirring milk in enormous containers, dhaba owners taking a breather in the sun, leaving their smoky premises for a brief moment. Dark murky interiors dominate here; a different face of life is caught; lives seem to stay perennially at the edge of dreary routine. There is no romanticisation here, no clean-cut edges of life. Mr. Manna simply enters reality differently, obliquely as it were. But in the process, he takes his viewer firmly with him, and involves him. One tends to lose sight of the finesse, the refinement of technique that alone could have resulted in photographs of this order, for one gets so completely absorbed in these seemingly ‘ordinary’ scenes, once the threshold from life to art and back to life is crossed.
