Sunlight and Shadows
Pictorialism and Salon Photography in Mid-Twentieth Century Bombay
Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a concerted global aesthetic movement that argued for photography's artistic status on par with other plastic arts more powerfully than ever. Led by self-trained photographers affiliated with camera clubs, pictorialism is marked by its commitment to ideas of truth and beauty, the ideal of the picturesque, soft focus, dreamy visual effect, and chiaroscuro that were often achieved through darkroom alterations to maximize the pictorial quality.
The exhibition at Gallery Prologue is unique in allowing us an entry point to reflect on the long history of the globally available intellectual and visual vocabulary of pictorialist photography by navigating selected works of Bombay-based camera artists from the 1930s through the 1960s, in the backdrop of British colonialism and after.
On view are silver gelatin prints by leading Indian salon photographers F. R. Ratnagar, D. Bachech, Habib Rahimtula, A. L. Syed, Minoo Polson, M. V. Vijaykar, and D. R. Mody. Based in Bombay, their practice was part of the global salon culture that shaped the popular, and routinely found in the catalogs of salons held abroad. The works of these photo artists shared a set of formal attributes that thrived on their respective choice of subjects, usage of natural light, and compositional idiom. As the exhibits demonstrate pastoral scenes, natural beauty, historical architectural, and human emotions were preferred choices in terms of subjects, while the compositions followed the academic rules of painterly compositions, including diagonal arrangements to indicate motion, “s”-shaped arrangement to convey complexity, and one-third rule via-a-vis the horizon to break the spatial monotony.
Depending on their subjects, the compositions are often augmented by natural light beams and reflective surfaces, usually water bodies, as independent subjects in the frame. The natural elements in these frames are not supplemental atmospheric gloss, instead they emerge as central to the compositions.
Gallery Prologue’s archival holdings of some of the salon catalogues, many of them on view, situate the exhibited prints in their artistic context, allowing us to analyze their formal qualities within an expanded field of history, politics and epistemic power relationship. The exhibition demonstrates how pictorialist photography quietly kept thriving, prompting historians to rethink the attributes and the timeline of pictorialism, while also rearticulating the location of photography in the history of global modernism and how pictorialism and modernism often mapped on to one another.
Excerpted from the curatorial essay by Dr. Ranu Roychoudhuri