EFFULGENCE :Two Photographers’ Windows
By Elizabeth Rogers
Elizabeth Rogers analyses the photographic works of Diwan Manna and Michel Dieudonne as they present their works in Chandigarh. These photographers react to the city designed by Le Corbusier and the outcome seems to be exciting, says Rogers.
As the second phase of the project Regards Croises opens in Chandigarh, relevant questions on the power of photography to record, transmit and communicate a timeless vision of architecture and its site-specific ramifications. Ode to jyotsna, or light of consciousness, presents in these two exhibitions the photographs of Diwan Manna and Michel Dieudonne on the respective visions of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh and Firminy.
A conjunction of awareness, the lexicon and metaphorical vocabulary of the architect, unfolds through the images caught through these two different individual’s lenses. Like mathematical proofs, assigning symbols to energy, such protean stratagems of concrete and intangible congeal. Difficult to analyze the extent two which one’s work is inspired by that of another, to unravel the embrace of the harmonious chords played through another medium. Manna and Dieudonne render the humanist dimensions of space, form, colour and light in confluent compositions of tonal interplay and shadows.
How does one church compare with an entire city, save for the role of comforting, embracing the dimensions of the human condition – yet a shared material, concept of light and concrete matter. Connection in this project as Martine Dancer has cited to be the timeliness of the realization of Chandigarh and the drafting of the plans for the Saint-Pierre Church in Firminy.
In many ways, Chandigarh is a testimony to the large vision of the East. Not that Le Corbusier was by any means the neither first nor last foreign architect to work in India. Much earlier, in another era the flowing roundabouts and laid out area of central Delhi was designed by Lutyens, and more recently permission granted to the American architect resident of Delhi, Joseph Stein to create the Indian International Centre (IIC) oasis bordering/adjoining the Lodhi gardens replete with historical tombs, and later the nearby India Habitat Centre. However, Chandigarh involved a complete urban site, one affecting the lives of its inhabitants in a holistic, round-the-clock way; in fact a product of Nehru’s desire for “an expression of the nation’s faith in the future,”
Photography, since its foundations in the 19th century, has facilitated broader cross-cultural communication. Following earlier the publication of memoirs of travel, which ferried back to the West images of unfamiliar customs, costumes, art and traditions, such as the memoirs of Marco Polo or the History of Japan (1727). From this point hence, one realizes the strength and import of drawings, paintings and topographical prints in imparting knowledge and perhaps empathy of distant shores, of cultures which most readers/viewers shall never have the first hand encounter with, for example those of the Daniell Brothers and the Napoleonic campaign documented in Descriptions de L’Egypte. With the camera, more striking visual renditions spanned the world, such as the Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837-1921), first to photograph Angkor Wat, published in his first book, Antiquities of Cambodia in1867 (cf. Voyages en Chine-Formose, notes by A. Talandier, Le Tour du Monde, 1875; and Stephen White, John Thomson: A Window to the Orient, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1986). Quite naturally, with the establishment of studios in India under the Raj (John Falconer, India; Pioneering Photographers 1850-1920, British Library Publication Services, 2001) and court photographers such as Lala Deen Layal (1844-1905), this dissemination of imagery continued spanning from landscapes to monuments, palaces and ethnographic matter.
On another dimension, the relationship between photography and modern architecture has been explored by Wayne Andrews (1931-87), in his thesis at Columbia University, Architecture, Ambition and Americans, was among the first important analyses of culture as it relates to architecture and archival photographs, by the photographer and architectural historian. The late Roberto Schezen, Italian architectural photographer, worked extensively on Adolf Loos, 1903-32 (with Kenneth Frampton, Splendor series, The Monacelli Press, 1996) and Louis Kahn (text by Joseph Rykwert, Harry Abrams, 2001), as well as numerous aesthetic and artistic sites.
Diwan Manna, the Chandigarh based photographer, studied painting and explores realms and “depicts the possibility of crossing borders” between entities and disciplines, let alone media. Known for his work in experimental and conceptual photography, as an artist-in-residence for several weeks in Firminy, he created his series entitled “Master of Light”. These works bear a testimony to abstraction, dots of colour and light, at the time of the completion of the construction of the church of Saint-Pierre. There is a theatrical facet to such imagery, a sense of momentary drama, completely alive and in the throes of movement from an almost atomic level.
Seen in the series entitled Master of Light are shadow reflections of what resembles at once a church’s spires (not of this eglise’s style), the tubular stalactite pipes of an organ or the flame-like tongues of an erect fire. Manna endows this concrete edifice with the life and light, which the architect envisioned; he enables it not only to breath, but also to sing and dance. Other renditions of such illumination depict parallel figures, in which crosses of light are geometric, from some assorted images a gyroscope of light bridges the inner space of the edifice.
Reminiscent of son and Lumiere ceiling montages in planetariums, or astronomical phenomena witnessed in the skies such as the Pleaidean meteor showers, certain of Manna’s photographs capture a stellar curve of circles and seeming ellipses through which light pass. His shots of visitors to the Church gazing upon these plays of light and sequential rectangles of the palette connect with the work of the artist James Turrell who is considered a contemporary ‘light master’. Lunar opalescence, pearl grey and tinges of fuschia cross the picture frame. The coloured interior walls, for which Le Corbusier was recognized, bring to mind paintings by the Russian constructivists and the abstract expressionists.
So, the cross regard of this project took the French photographer Michel Dieudonne to Chandigarh, the city of “Sun, Space and Verdure”. His images constitute an apt, albeit distinct, voice for a balanced harmonic. Aside from his more urban quotidian images, Dieudonne’s work examines the interstice of form and light, the edges of the concrete and the zen-like spaces of the intangible. Another examination of the imagery of light and the protean substratum of organisms. There are a quite a number of triptychs, both of quite a painterly composition and nature. A chiaroscuro permeates these colors, a subtle lighting, whether focused upon apertures or three-dimensional apparitions. Doorways, windows, slivers of space, architectonic and sculptural meet at edges, crystallized in the photographer’s eye.
Le Corbusier’s vocabulary of perspective and organic form, structure and aesthetic together, appear in the elements of space and design (Haute Court Pilones) of coloured support columns treated as sculptures without beginning or end. In another photograph, Assemblees Interieurs Musical, the vertical assemblage harkens of the monochrome architectural works of Piranesi and the futuristic old master fantastic worlds of Bosch. An ode to the still life, Haute Court Dedans-Dehors, juxtaposes a signboard, an entrance/exit and a seated newspaper, as if a surreal orchestra at intermission situated itself in front of our eyes.
Architectural significance unfolds as spaces, sites and edifices continue to harbour, entrance and inspire succeeding generations. In the words of one historian, known for her somewhat critical judgment of the architect, nonetheless Rachel Kennedy wrote “Le Corbusier see nature as fulfilling unlimited human needs and wants. Nature becomes "other" in his plans. A sustainable city would take humankind out of the center of being and replace him/her with the notion of inter-connectedness: the deep ties that weave our lives together with the natural world. Nature is respected for its balance seeking process and its limits.” (Le Corbusier and the Radiant City Contrast, True Urbanity and the Earth) Just so, that these two photographers journeyed to perceive through their respectively individual mind’s eye two very different sites with two different projects both in scale and conception, yet explored the chromatic hues and spatial configurations of a lasting, relevant visionary.
