Photography has become the dominant art on the dynamic and very vibrant Georgian contemporary art scene for last two decades. It has been regularly featured outside of the South Caucasus region that Georgia is part of and has surprised the foreign audience by the richness of the photographic traditions. The Georgian Photography Week in India that opened on November 25th in New Delhi , co-organized by the Embassy of Georgia to India and the annual international Tbilisi Photo Festival is the first ever presentation of Georgian photography in India.
The central event of the Week is the Georgian-Indian photo exhibition entitled Faces: The Portraits Studios in India and Georgia that gathers the collection of photographs On the Road to Tusheti (1950-1975) by the Georgian photographer Shalva Alkhanaidze and a series of portraits by Suresh Pubjabi called Studio Suhag (1970s and 1980s).
Studio Suhag is the collection of portraits produced by Suresh Punjabi in the portrait studio in Nagda, a small town in central India in the 1970s and 1980s that evokes a world where the studio portrait was an important memento, capturing not just the ‘real’ subject, but also a persona made over to meet the camera’s eye.
Studio Suhag presents a slice of the 1970s and 80s history from central India. The images by Suresh Punjabi, are testimony to an era of hands-on studio photography when physical materials combined with the photographer’s ingenuity to stage and record astonishing and poignant human dramas. They present a space in which the camera captured not only ‘real’ subjects, but also personae made over to meet the camera’s eye. Here are laborers and bohemians, villagers and townspeople, the devout and the cosmopolitan. All are depicted with the aid of a relatively fixed repertoire of backdrops, lights, and accessories.
On the other side, Georgian photographer Shalva Alkahanidze (1927-1987) documented for almost three decades the everyday life of inhabitants of his native Tushetia, a high mountain region in the North-East of Georgia, 2000 meters high in the Greater Caucasus mountain range. Shalva Alkhanaidze’s work consists of two big series: Photo for Passport, the collection of photo studio style portraits of Tushetians and The Road to Tushetia, the breathtaking chronicles of life in high mountain villages. Both series are part of the exhibition Faces: The Portrait Studios in India and Georgia.
Development of Georgian photography in the second half of the 20th century was stamped by the lasting tradition of USSR to use art as an ideological tool. That was also the reason why photography during the Soviet period in all ex-Soviet republics is not, in generally, free of ideological and political influences. Shalva Alkhanaidze has filled the gap made by only political propagandist use of photography during 70 years, in the USSR. His archive, that gathers thousands of photos, is a brilliant visual chronicle representing one of the most beautiful alpine regions of Georgia showing Tushetian traditions, customs, nature and everyday life of local people. The region that is “isolated” from the rest of the country and remains inaccessible during almost nine months – from the moment when first snow falls till the end of May.
The Georgian Photography Week in India
November 25 -30 2017
India Habitat Center
Lodhi Road, Near Airforce Bal Bharati School
New Delhi
Delhi 110003
India
http://www.tbilisiphotofestival.com/
