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| Sohini Chattopadhyay / New Delhi Sep 05, 2010, 00:55 IST |
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Twins are a fascinating subject, but an exhibition of Ketaki Sheth’s photographs of twins does not engage.
Back in my school days, when the morning newspapers went straight to my father’s room, the Sunday magazine offered a special treat: the spot-the-difference puzzle. Two pictures, nearly identical but for a few things. A little squinting and you had the answers. Ketaki Sheth’s “Twinspotting” offers some of the same childlike thrill.
But Sheth’s work does not just explore a quirky idea. More anthropological in treatment than the catchy title suggests, “Twinspotting”, or the germ of it, was born at a dinner party in Kent in 1995 where Sheth came across a London directory devoted to Patels. Intrigued, she flipped through it and realised there were 30,000 Patels living in Britain alone. A little more digging around with the help of her Patel husband, Aurobind, and Sheth had found her subject: twins from the Hindu Patel community of Charotar in Gujarat.
Over the next four years, Sheth photographed more than 100 pairs of twins living in the UK and Gujarat but chose 80 for the project, including some triplets. The photos are all in black and white, which Sheth says is because of her exposure to the legends during her course in New York. “My work at NYU was all B&W and my exposure to those great darkrooms were all B&W. I absolutely loved it — working, thinking, breathing, printing in B&W,” she says in an email interview. The style is posed. Every pair of twins is obviously dressed up for the occasion, and shot at home or familial premises. Many of them hold hands or hold each other, perhaps to reinforce the intimate bond. All of this comes together to create the sense of an old-fashioned family album.
“Twinspotting” was published as a book in 1999 by Dewi Lewis Publishing, with detailed notes by Sheth on individual birth dates, occupations and ancestral villages, underscoring the documentary-style treatment of the project.
Given this kind of annotation, the current exhibition at Gallery PhotoInk is conspicuously lacking in text. Each photograph is accompanied only by a number and interested viewers have to get a pamphlet from the desk to read the corresponding caption. The absence of text may well be a deliberate curatorial choice, of treating the photographs as works of art by themselves. But it’s a strange decision that undermines the documentary scope of the work, and results in a show that intrigues but doesn’t engage. So the photographs remain curiosities: stop, look and spot the similarities. Little more than your Sunday morning puzzle really.
This is unfortunate because “Twinspotting” is obviously a significant work. It has shown four times in India since 1999 in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. In its second coming to Delhi, however, only 30 of Sheth’s original 78 photographs are on display.
In his foreword to the book “Twinspotting”, photographer Ragubir Singh writes, “The photographs go beyond a mere immersion in the anthropological oddity of twins. We do not stare, we enter.” That’s exactly what we miss here. Twins, by their very nature, are fascinating. We gape at them in play school, we nudge in high school, and we can’t help stealing a second glance when we go to drop our own kids to school. Sadly, this avatar of “Twinspotting” doesn’t take us beyond that second glance.
Twinspotting will show at Gallery PhotoInk till October16
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