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Click! Contemporary Photography from India

27th February 2008 - 27th March 2008

Photo of artist

“Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print”. Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, 1980

Grosvenor Vadehra is excited to announce its ambitious exhibition titled Click: Contemporary Photography from India in collaboration with Fotomedia. Curated by Sunil Gupta and Radhika Singh, the exhibition includes more than a hundred images from a large range of photographers. The exhibition, which will run concurrently at Grosvenor Vadehra’s premises in London and New Delhi, takes an unbiased look at the Indian condition through contemporary photography.

Indian Photography, long left on the sidelines, has witnessed the emergence of a younger generation with its own readings and concerns. What needs to be recorded? What needs to be preserved for our personal and collective memory? Photography has come to replace the great oral traditions of Indian society. Family histories, social change, detailed human recollections have been supplanted by the photograph.

Sunil Gupta comments, “In India we’re still modernising but we’ve been overtaken by global events. No longer is photography the craft limited to temperate climes where processing at 20°C is the norm. Digital has arrived and anyone can do it, and everyone is doing it. Finally the medium is in hands of the people of this country in a way it never was before. It’s what the Box Brownie did for America.”

The exhibition looks a wide range of photography from the self portraiture of Baptist Coelho and Ram Rahman’s portraits of Indian artists such as the post-progressive F. N. Souza to the photojournalism of Pablo Bartholomew famous for his documentation of the religious and ethnic violence in India. Also featured is Gauri Gill’s stark depiction of real-time India in Nizamuddin at night in which we are confronted with India’s barren wasteland the birth place of a new urban sprawl. Other photographers have chosen a more personal means of recording the modern world, for example the exhibition includes Vivan Sundaram’s picture of his partner, Geeta Kapur’s bookshelf.

Click!’s curators aimed, “to see what was out there across the country [India]….Whether they [the photos] were taken for an expensive commercial client or on a Sunday stroll. Whether they were academic exercises in art making or everyday reportage, all that mattered is that someone had clicked that shutter and wanted to show us the result. We contact over six hundred such people around India. We met over two hundred of them and over eighty of them are represented here” (Sunil Gupta, 2008). India’s photographers are involved in creating some of the most exciting and challenging work worldwide and are starting to take centre stage closely following the painters and installation artists who have gained international status in the contemporary art world.

The exhibition will include both single works and groups of photographs. Each work is pivotal in the story of Indian photography. Some represent a dramatic rupture with India’s past proposing radical new forms. Others capture the reality of modern life or its impact on the individual, addressing the question of Indian identity. Others are more radical, proposing to take modern life and revolutionize it.

Underlying the whole is the relationship between the individual and society, experience and memory, life and death.