Georgina Maddox, The Indian Express, November 24 2010
The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), is showcasing a never-seen-before selection of pioneer photographer Raja Deen Dayal’s oeuvre in an exhibition, which captures India from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Seen through the lens of one of India’s first court photographers, the exhibition is a slice of history.
It also marks the digitisation of 220 Deen Dayal’s glass plate negatives by Kaushik Ramaswamy, who has restored the works as well as placed them in a digital archive for posterity. “These images have been lying with the IGNCA for years, but with the opening of the new gallery, the exhibition that has taken a year of hard labour has finally come together,” says Ramaswamy.
Curated by Dr Jyotindra Jain and Pramod Kumar, the exhibition begins with Deen Dayal’s open-air photography of moments, cities, temples, palaces and festivals, and ends with his famed studio portraits of Indian royalty and bourgeois during the early years of the British East India Company.
“Our main criterion was to make Deen Dayal’s astonishingly big body of work accessible to the public. Besides its nostalgic value, his work is a great study tool since it captures the drama of the past and recreates an epoch,” says Kumar, managing director of Eka, a cultural resource and research centre.
Jain, a curator and cultural theorist who is credited with curating several significant shows, says that though the exhibition has been arranged chronologically to present a sense of history to the viewer, it is Deen Dayal’s style that is the main clue to understanding the importance of his work. “When photographing the Nizam of Hyderabad, Deen Dayal would imagine that it was the Nizam himself who was behind the camera and take the picture in a spirit that captured him at his best moment,” says Jain.
Besides the courtly portraiture that marks most of the collection, there are some interesting images to watch out for, like the photograph of M M Shirazee and friends. The group of youngsters pose before a backdrop of the countryside with their bicycles, dressed in a typical British style, in a 1889 portrait. What is interesting is that the image has not been cropped and it reveals the fake landscape against which they are posing in a gently humorous way. There is also an unusual, 1890s image of Gulam Mahmood with nautch girls and wine, an image considered daring for the times, as are the many portraits of dancers like Firoza Begum and courtesans that stand in the hall of fame, alongside queens and princesses.
While certain purist photographers wish the exhibition was not a collection of digital prints but the actual albumen prints developed from the glass plate, others are just happy to see the works that had been lying unattended for decades.
The exhibition that opened on November 19 is on till February.