The Personified Images into Leman’s Mirror

Dilawar Khan's Works

Dilawar Khan’s works can be reckoned ‘personified visuals’ as abundance of human portraits is a primal feature of his works. Peculiarly created in flank manner these portraits speak of variegated human expressions and emotions, as each ‘subjectified’ portrait contains multiple portraits within. Dilawar believes in recital quality of a face which communicates with all intramural sensations, and undoubtedly the female faces are more expressive than of male ones. They hold the subtle delicacy begetting the gustation of beauty as well. So, making the female faces is likely to endorse his ideas more precisely.

(Dilawar's Earlier Works)

He relies in impact of visual approach, thus in beauty and its amorous; another reason which leads him to create the female faces notably and to use ‘golden’ and ‘red’ into works. His earlier black and white color palette is becoming bright and warm with the recent works. It makes his works ‘decorative’ in a concern where ‘contemporary’ is considered in the ability to gush conceptuality and intellectuality. Here Dilawar’s approach goes with ‘indian-ness’ rather than falsely following the contemporary, a western cliché. He brings us back to the words of A. Ramachandran, ‘decorativeness is a part of Indian culture. To us, decorativeness is the life force. The whole surface of the picture pulsates with life because of decorativeness.’ 

          

His deliberately created pictorial images introduce his protagonists to the world with keyed eyes. They seemingly delved into their introspection or into their own emotive gravity, and rarely open up their locks to give a glance to the world around. It’s obvious of the capacity of these images to arise the same in the heart of viewers as well. He must have tried to put a mirror in-front of the viewer in form of his mattery portraits. Apart from making his protagonists emotive effigies, he is conscious of the entry of machinery into human lives also; as his meticulous portraits are hooked by nut bolts in few of later works. This tendency of arrival of machinery has become more precise in his recent works. This can be seen in his sculptures as well where he uses the Stephanie of a bike at the place of the eye of an ‘ancient scientist’. He uses mainly wood as a material for his sculptures and arise the contemporary issues of ‘chair’ also via them. 

          

(Dilawar's Recent Works)

         

  

                        (Dilawar's Wooden Sculptures)

(The Sculptural Work 'Ancient Scientist')

(The Sculptural Work 'Chair')

His art practices straddles between meaty and mechanical, discernible and cryptical, unlit and splendent, cardinal and concise as a subject, material and visual approach. The crux of Dilawar’s thought process lies in experimenting with traditional media like oils in painting and wood in sculptures and imbibing the consequences of synchronous as his subjects.

Photo Courtesy: The Artist

My Goa Diary

Until few days back Goa was a place I had heard about, seen in pictures in newspapers, magazines, television and in Hindi movies. Off course they were merely the ‘touristic’ presentations of Goa with beach beauties and blue sky balancing with lanky coconut trees. Touristic attractions/luxury were never been a reason to visit any place for me, but due to artistic, historical (or both art historical) and cultural curiosity I always wanted to visit Goa. And finally this month of August, I got to go Goa during ‘the photogenic drawing workshop’ organized by Goa-CAP (Goa Center for Alternative Photography) at Goa-CAP premises, Dongorpur, Calangute.

(An envisaged Image of Goa one could have before visiting the Place)

Day-1

Reaching to Goa by bus from Hyderabad confronted a surpassing rainy morning to me. Who knew then that the word ‘rainy’ was no more a prefix to that only morning as the whole forthcoming week was going to wet with rain including all mornings, afternoons and evenings. And that’s the charm of being in Goa to carry an umbrella always and to see people in rain-wears wearing Goan hats around. The day was started with introductions to Goa-CAP team P. Madhavan, the Executive Director of Goa-CAP and Edson Dias, the Co-Founder of Goa-CAP and to Sandra Castañeda Suárez, who was going to take the workshop of the Art of Photogenic Drawing a day after. My early arrival brought the pickings to meet some wonderful people around apart from the next day visit to Old Goa, as a short course on ‘Fundamentals of Arts Management’ was on in collaboration with ARThinkSouthAsia conducted by versed Indian tutors like Mohit Gopal, Pooja Sood, and Manisha Gupta. One of among these wonderful people I can name Apurva Kulkarni, who has all the deftness to engage someone in continues conversations even a tranquil person like me.

(Goa Center for Alternative Photography, Credits: B. Ajay Sharma)

Day-2

It started by envisaging the sublimity of nature at Candolim beach and spending rest of the day in visiting Old Goa was benignant time enough for a lone walker. From Calangute to Panjim and then from Panjim to Old Goa by the local buses could bring some introspective dormant hours into account of an occupied day long time-table. The day long visits to Archeological Museum, Kristu Kala Mandir Art Gallery, Wax De Goa, and a few churches around including the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, Basilica of Bom Jesus, and Se Cathedral church in Velha/Old Goa finally resulted into the end of the day at Mapusa, North Goa in visiting few temples around and then to Calangute Beach after returning to Calangute.

Day-3

It was the actual purposeful day, the beginning of two days long (August 18- 19, 2013) workshop of photogenic drawings. A batch of five people Chandana Gupta Casson, Lalit Vikamshi, Nelvin Dsouza, Myself Nisha Aggarwal and Urmimala Chatterjee, came from divergent practices but connected to visual arts at its core set together to learn the basics of the photogenic drawing process under the guidance of Sandra Castañeda Suárez. Hailing from Mexico Sandra is a guest for India from first week of August, who is undertaking a research residency at Goa Center for Alternative Photography.

She studied BFA in photography at the Veracruz University, Mexico and interned at George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.  There she worked for Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman, the photographic process historians while assisting them in workshops. She was General Manager of Lomography in Mexico from 2011 to 2013. After asked that how’s India afore her eyes, she says that she came in India for two months but now she feels never to leave it as eventually she is in love with India. Before setting up to proceed the work we had the palatable breakfast at Sandra’s place. I am feeling it mentionable because it was the Goan food brought by Lalit for all of us. After that we started with the introduction to the process of photogenic drawings.

       

 

(The Negative & Positive Picture of Our Group at Goa-CAP:

Developed by the Van Dyke Brown Process by me) 

Sandra started with telling the history of the photogenic drawings along with the process.  As the Photogenic drawings were invented by William Henry Fox Talbot (Born in Dorset 1800-1877), a gentleman scientist whose interest included optics, chemistry, botany, mathematics, linguistics, inventions and art. His mother Lady Elizabeth Fielding was an artist. Talbot was the first to develop the method of producing positive photographic prints from negatives. In 1834, he went for honeymoon at Lake Como in Italy with his wife Constance. There, he attempted to sketch using a camera- Lucida(an instrument that transferred the view before him onto paper). But he became frustrated with his sketches and intended to determine with his knowledge of chemistry that on his return to England he would find a way to permanently capture his images on paper. 

He began experimenting with silver nitrate in 1834. Eventually he came upon the technique of sensitizing the paper with successive coats of sodium chloride and silver nitrate solutions, drying one before applying the next onto good quality drawing paper. This technique of alternative coatings allowed the silver chloride to be formed in a very even layer upon and slightly within the paper. After drying the both coatings, the paper was covered with negative image and kept for exposure usually made by contact printing for as long as it took an image to appear or for about an hour. Then further washing it in a strong solution of sodium chloride with tap water, and acquired image would then be fixed by use of sodium chloride; which dissolved away any remaining silver nitrate more efficiently and subsequently became the standard for all silver processes. Talbot’s success increased over subsequent years as he refined his photogenic drawing process via making minute observations about the percentages of required chemicals, exposure time etc. Much of Talbot’s early experiments were done with laying leaves, lace and other items under a sheet of glass placed on top of his coated paper, whom he called the ‘photograms’, much closer to his botanical interest.

     

 

(William Henry Fox Talbot & One of his Photogram from the Album sent by Talbot to a fellow Botanist)

Talbot reasoned that his silver chloride prints could be ‘fixed’ with the other halides such as potassium bromide and potassium iodide. Talbot used the term ‘fix’ to mean ‘stabilization’ or to make reasonably permanent, as they are never fixed because silver nitrate keeps reaching always when exposed to daylight. The three halide fixing treatments resulted in three different highlight colours, particularly when the finished prints were subjected to daylight. Chloride highlights went purple, bromide went cool blue and iodide turned cool to warm yellow. Talbot’s photogenic drawings can be found with a wide variety of colour combinations depending how deeply the paper was printed, how they were fixed and their subsequent exposure to light. 

Talbot didn’t make any formal announcement of his discoveries until he heard an announcement on 7 January 1839 in Paris that LJM Daguerre had discovered a way of fixing a photographic image. Talbot reacted immediately and wrote a paper on his process that was presented to the Royal Institution, in London on 31 January 1839 by Michael Farraday. In fact Daguerre’s discovery was quite different from Talbot’s discovery. Talbot later invented and patented his Tablotype or Calotype process. This negative/positive process was the forerunner to today’s conventional photography. Both the photogenic drawing process and the subsequent Calotype process enabled multiple prints to be produced from a single negative. Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) continued the work of Talbot, exploring a wide range of materials and processes. Sandra told us if one research over the work of Herschel, one would find a lot of interesting things about the history of photography. 

Besides the oral descriptions and conversations about the photogenic drawing’s history and process, Sandra showed us the process of developing positive prints via negatives in Goa- CAP’s dark room. For few of us it was the first experience to work in a darkroom, and our day was ended up with an individual try to do the same afterwards.  

          

 

(Sandra Showing us the Process while Lalit looks upon 

& Urmimala and Lalit at work)

             

(Photograms on Postcards: removing the glass after UV exposure & Drying it up by an hair dryer after washing and stablizing)

          

(Keeping prints in UV light & washing them and stabilizing)

Day-4

The second day of workshop meant to individual trial and practice for all five people. We all selected our photographs we already had in our cameras, given them dark, middle and lighter tones as suggested by Sandra, converted them into negative images via Photoshop and then got them printed onto gateway paper. This way the negatives were ready to take positive prints by following the process of photogenic prints. We learned few more things while doing work by our own. We were directed to wear latex gloves while applying silver nitrate to the paper, as it leaves black marks onto skin if touches. And these marks don’t get removed before two weeks which could be cause of skin cancer at longer terms. We could use the hair dryer to dry the coatings applied over paper, because natural drying takes time and we were more people using the lab, darkroom and it’s equipments in single time. 

(The first Photogenic Print by me on four Postcards)

Day-5

It was the extra day into my account, to take advantage of availability of time and required equipments at lab/dark room. I took ‘photogramic’ prints on post cards as since morning I was searching various leaves of interesting shapes from all around.

   

           

 

              

          

          

          

          

          

          

(A Set of 18 Postcards/Photograms by me)

Apart from it I took prints in Van Dyke Brown process, another process of alternative photography, as one of my friend B. Ajay Sharma was working with this process since last months. Ajay was working hard day and nights at lab and in dark room with developing his Van Dyke Browns. It was very obvious for me to have curiosity over the process, I was watching subsequently from last few days as a process and result. And it was good that availability of time allowed me to learn and experiment in that also. I had developed negatives for the same pictures in both A4 and post card sizes for photogenic prints, so I used them for Van Dykes also with A4 size on Fabriano paper and smaller one onto postcards. After taking prints I observed the significant difference between Photogenic prints and Van Dyke prints is that Van Dykes has much more glossy visual effect while photogenic prints look sober and ‘absorbed’.

       
        

         

 

        

        

(Negative & Positive Images of my Van Dykes on Postcards)

       

        

        

        

(Negative & Positive images of my Van Dykes on A4 Fabriano)

It was the last day to complete the desired work at lab, so at one side being engaged with work brought the placid hours to me; whereas the one week tour to Goa seemed still insufficient at other hand. Not because I wanted to visit the place more than I could, but in effect I was feeling myself in fondness with Goa. And I would say that Goa is just a perfect place for photography practices which is trying to revive the alternative in India, as I remember I asked to P. Madhavan, 'that why he has chosen the place Goa as a Center for Alternative Photography?' His cogent answer was worthy to make me persuasive that 'the slow process of alternative photography demands a serene environment rather than a hustling bustling metropolitan'. 

Finally, apart from doing work and getting introduced to the earliest alternative technique of photograph printing, it was memorable to meet such wonderful people, making new friends and spending the ‘learning’ days at Goa- CAP; while ‘earning’ the plenty of healthy energy in mind which one gets from nature and positivity around.