Given that the invention of photography was announced in 1839 and I was born in 1938, I have lived through a bit more than 40% of the medium's history. If I make it to 100, I will have lived through half: In other words, the whole of photography can be encompassed in a few lifespans.
"Sepia at Seven: A Celebratory Group Show" at Sepia International vividly illustrates this compression by mixing contemporary works from the gallery's first seven years of exhibitions with 19th-century works from the Alkazi Collection, an affiliated archive of more than 70,000 19th and early 20th century photographs, mostly from India, Burma, and Sri Lanka.The danger in such an effort is the possibility of ending up with a mindless mishmash, but what they have put together is coherent, almost always interesting, and frequently beautiful.
The first picture in "Sepia at Seven" is Raghubir Singh's "After an Accident, Grand Trunk Road, Bihar" (1991), an image that contrasts the eternal landscape of India with a dramatic instance of the intrusion of modernity, the bucolic and the surreal. The left side of the picture looks down on an idyllic rural landscape of pale browns and greens. There are fields and irrigation ponds, farmers and their cattle, a few trees, and a mountain seen hazily in the distance. But the right foreground is entirely taken up by the hood and cab of a big overturned truck lying on its side. Although the top of the cab is decorated with elaborate Indian calligraphy, the truck's most distinctive feature is its whorish red color.
The Singh photograph contains both old and new in one image, but a few black-and-white landscapes farther along in the exhibition demonstrate a timeless vision of South Asia. One description can cover "Ceylon, Nurwara Eliya, the Rambodde Pass" (1880s) by Scowen and Co. and "Ranikhet, Snowy Range" (1869) by John Edward Saché: dramatic trees along a ridge in the foreground, a deep vista with majestic mountains in the far distance, and clouds.
Both these albumen prints have the same warm coloration and are about the same modest size as the two recent pictures by Linda Connor, "Tree, Alchi Monastery, Ladakh, India" (1985) and "Village Reservoir Spiti" (1994), although Ms. Connor's pictures are on printing-out paper toned with gold chloride. The two Connor pictures also have trees as key elements. In the first, a tree seems to be engorging part of a building, as if nature were winning against civilization; in the second, a ring of delicate trees is reflected in the reservoir. Taken together, the four pictures have a characteristic common to much art from Asia: Parts of the natural world are subsumed into a design that then hints at some transcendental significance. Many works in the exhibition are tinged with a near mystical quality.
Two other photographs that incorporate an almost identical element are Osamu James Nakagawa's "Kai Series, Mt. Fuji, Japan" (1999) and Marissa Roth's "Afternoon on a Garbage Dump, Metro Manila" (1988). In this case, the identical element is a large soap bubble, but unlike the trees in the four landscapes, the bubbles are used in very different contexts.
Mr. Nakagawa's bubble drifts in an elegant Oriental landscape in which Japan's sacred mountain is seen as if contained in the bubble. Ms. Roth's bubble is being blown by a young girl. A man naked to below the waist sits behind her to the right, and we see part of another half-naked male figure to the far right, as well as part of a young girl's face to the left. Although not actually threatening, these figures adumbrate the meanness of the environment suggested by the picture's title. The girl blowing the bubble has her eyes closed and is concentrating as if she hopes she could float away in it.
A theme that informs several other pictures is disembodied body parts. A woman is making obeisance to the plaster head of a goddess in a basket in Ketaki Sheth's "Four Girls, Gauri Immersion" (1988). Parts of a doll - the head, a leg, a hand - lie scattered on a bed of dead leaves in Rosalind Solomon's "Gloria Leaves, Rutland, Vermont" (1975). Graciela Iturbide's "Homenaje a Don Manuel A. Bravo, Benares, India" (1999), recaps Bravo's well-known picture of an oculist's sign in the shape of two huge eyes peering through a pair of glasses, although this one is surrounded by other signs in Hindi script. And in Annu Palakunatthu Matthew's "Coconut Husks" (2000), two naked and shoeless legs are seen from the knees down, crossing a field textured with the stripped husks.
Garments figure prominently in about a quarter of the pictures in "Sepia at Seven." These range from the intricate patterns of the robe, turban, and slippers in "Marharana Fateh Singh of Udaipur (r. 1884-1930)" (1890s) - a skillfully painted photograph from an unknown studio - to the several black-and-white pictures by Miyako Ishiuchi from her 2000-01 "Mother's" series. Ms. Ishiuchi, a highly regarded Japanese photographer, took "portraits" of her mother's chemises, girdles, and other effects that seem to capture the essence of the determined woman who wore them.
It is in keeping with the aims of the Sepia and Alkazi enterprise that a contemporary artist would draw on her culture's traditional interest in fabrics and vestments to make avantgarde photographs resonant with meaning and feeling.
SEPIA | The Alkazi Collection
148 West 24th Street, 11th Floor (between 6th and 7th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011 t: 212-645-9444
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Friday, 10 am - 6 pm
www.sepia.org
The original is by William Meyers of the The New York Sun, Thursday, March 9, 2006
