The world has comprehended photography in a myriad ways. Among the many ways, rests a poetic interpretation of photography, one that also finds space in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude — a photograph captures a part of the soul. On World Photography Day, Krish Bhalla, a young yet experienced photographer shared his photography at the Indira Gandhi National Museum of Arts, Delhi. His work invokes the age-old poetic notion of capturing souls.
“I did not know I was a photographer till someone else saw my photographs and said so,” commences Krish Bhalla. Surrounded by a series of photographs in white frames, Bhalla talks just as much as his photographs do. What is perhaps most peculiar about Bhalla’s efforts is that he has decisively digressed from the aesthetic pleasure of photography and infused his work with a confident purpose. “I’m trying to talk about an India which most Indians are ignorant of,” he states. The series of photographs cover corners of Karnataka and Goa that have not yet been ravenously transformed by the surge of modernisation, and they try to narrate the story of a condition which only Bhalla describes best, “Imagine there are two cliffs and between them is a canyon, this canyon is the gap between the modern and the traditional India. I am simply trying to build a bridge between them, so that they are better understood.”
Bhalla’s exhibition is a part of a larger project called Edges of India, a project that tries to dim the lights of modernisation so that the afterglow of the traditional past may become clearly visible. “India is different from other nations because we can’t simply shed our past, traditions and move in stride with the world. One must realise that India is an individual that is composed of an eclectic mix of people, cultures and histories. Why do you think most iconic statues in India have several faces?”
In the spirit of Gandhian belief, “India does not live in its towns but its villages,” Bhalla undertook a journey of four arduous months, during which he spent nearly 12 hours a day outside, on foot, in his search of stories that substantiated his understanding of traditions and modernisation. “I met an Ayurvedic doctor who has attended to people like the Dalai Lama and Bill Clinton. He grows his own medicinal plants and also is fully aware of modern allopathy. It’s this overlap that I’d set out to discover.” But these are his thoughts; his photographs have even more to say.
Ranging from fish caught at the harbours in Goa and Karnataka, coffee plantations, tribals who once made bamboo handicrafts for kings but now sell them at the footsteps of temples for ₹5 a piece, volunteers healing animals in hopeless corners to people that are living on minimal means through farming or Tibetan refugees settled near the Ghats in Karnataka, he’s tried to capture it all. In each picture there is a portion of a soul, and you’re impelled to contemplate, if only for a moment, what must their life be like.
In a world, where cameras abound and the extent of archiving or chronicling is simply limitless, there is hardly ever substance being captured and saved for the future to learn from. Bhalla, who calls himself a historian, is among those that put in the effort to perform the simple altruistic act of saving something for posterity. “I started off with a two mega pixel Nikon as a kid,” he shares his journey into photography, “I depended on it till I was done with my degree in aviation. It was later on that I started using other cameras, Instagram and garnered some recognition.” He went onto study photography, thoroughly, for five years and it was then that he undertook his photographic documenting expedition.
What remains of Bhalla’s journey is in the frames and within him, from which he shares his lessons. “I learnt two things. First, to perform photography, one that has difficult subject matter, one must be detached. Secondly, an experience of this sort changes a man fundamentally; I am sure that I may look the same but I am no longer the person I was before.”
(The exhibition is on till August 29 at IGNCA)