Photographer Shailan Parker and his shots of black

In a new exhibition, Shailan Parker uses photography to offer a different take on everyday reality

In Marathi, “Kavadsa” means a ray of light (or as the photographer poetically puts it, “It is the light that enters a darkened room through chinks in a tiled roof, creating a small pool of light on the ground, bathing objects in its path in a luminescent glow.”). This is what photographer Shailan Parker is trying to depict with the black-and-white photographs that are a part of his first solo Fine Art Photography Exhibition. The exhibition, which is the first in the series he plans to hold to project photography as art, took four years to put together. What sets it apart is also the fact that it raised Rs 3.64 lakh through an online crowd-funding space as well as through friends and family.

Parker, a professional photographer whose clients include Satish Gujral, Vibhor Sogani and Himmat Shah, has chosen black-and-white as his medium because he feels it emphasises the image as opposed to colour, which engages your mind but softens the impact. He says he uses “photography to merge the gap between artificial and natural, resulting in aesthetically beautiful, organic images”.

Kavadsa means a ray of light

Like his inspiration, Edward Weston, “the pioneer of precise and sharp presentation” who was dubbed the most influential American photographer of the 20th century, Parker has used detailed, straight photography on ordinary still-life objects such as leaves, shells, stones, dead flowers and even garlic to create images that no longer resemble the everyday objects that we see around us. Instead, leaves resemble negatives of photographs, dead flowers on textured stones look like the surface of the moon and seeds look like spaceship pods. Parker, who is also visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and the National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi, calls this “painting with light”. He says, “People go to Ladakh to capture the beauty there, not realising how beautiful the discarded leaf outside their door is.” Unlike Weston, who was very particular about the aperture he used, Parker is not fussy about the camera he uses, saying, “I shoot on various cameras, including Mamiya, Nikon, Canon and Sony.”  Throughout the exhibition, he stresses on the effect of light and shadows as well as the texture and form of his sculpture-like subjects. The excess of detail adds an element of dreaminess and surrealism to the pictures, which is faintly ironical given the subjects he’s chosen.  This is because he feels it is important to explore the form of the image and visually reconnect to seeing and creating.

Kavadsa can be viewed at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi, till 15th March