So much fun in black and white

Shalini Saran can't stop marvelling about her new oeuvre in a conversation with Kishore Singh

At an age when it used to be mandatory for most people to retire, photographer Shalini Saran opened an exhibition of digital art to a response she found “overwhelming”. Those invited to the show, she said, “found it very interesting”.

Saran is in chatty mode, in itself something new for her, for as a photographer she tended to be somewhat more remote and reserved, the temperature dropping icily as you tried to negotiate a rate that suited the publication but not her expectation. Editors tended to describe her as “difficult”.

In the gallery at Art Motif, you hesitate a bit. These works on the wall, black and white and grey, are playful; they tease you and make you laugh a little bit, and you don’t know why because they’re very contained; layered and textured and manipulated but also spirited and dynamic and free-flowing. “I agree,” you can almost imagine Saran nodding at the contradiction, “there’s a sense of joyousness to them…to my life.” (Pinch yourself: did you actually hear that last bit or imagine it?)

Saran the photographer was an outcome of Saran the writer who was contemptuous of the talent that accompanied her on assignments, and so dismissed it and picked up her own camera and became a photo-journalist, though you can use that term only loosely in her context, for she worked only for the publications she respected, and for those editors or agencies who in turn respected her. This was in the eighties, when she was very busy, and in the nineties, when she was less so. In any case, a few years ago, she simply gave up. “I wanted to move away from the known,” she explains, “In photography you’re always dealing with the known.”

You suspect that Picasa and, later, Photoshop happened as ways to fill the space of time. “I began to play around with the simplest of forms,” she says. Play around? Saran?

She did, she confirms. “I started with a photograph as base” but later it grew into “a love of exploration of form and texture”. It was, she adds, a period “of exploring and experimenting” and though she had no idea what she wanted to do, triggers around her began to appear consciously and unconsciously in her doodling. “I found the girders on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon road interesting,” she recounts, so ergo, they became an element that became the central focus of some works.

For someone who has invested her craft with a quality almost of irreverence, denying all acceptable or known forms in art, replacing it with a naiveté that works because of its controlled calibration, Saran must have had nervous moments when pulling out of a work. Did she know when something was done, when nothing more was needed? “As a photographer I knew when to quit,” she tells you. “There’s a sharpness of eye that says: Stop now! You know at that moment that nothing more can be added or removed.” She also credits some of the larger (24’x42’) prints to her training as a photographer. “When you’ve worked in 35mm,” she says, “you know how something will look when it’s blown up.”

The digital prints in editions of three are available between Rs 10,000 and Rs 42,000, but you wonder: Does digital art have buyers? “Real lovers of art buy the works they like not because they are a photograph or watercolour or digital,” you can almost hear her exasperation. But the “joyous” Saran is immediately back: “The real thrill is when you inadvertently click on something new in the software and trigger off a whole new journey,” she says. Clearly, she’s enjoying hers.