Salaam Bombay

(The Times of India Crest Edition, March 5, 2011)

Chronicles of a Past Life - '70s & '80s In Bombay, photographer Pablo Bartholomew’s show at the Sakshi Gallery in Mumbai is “the street photography side of my work,” Bartholomew says. Since a lot of it had been done “in Bombay (as it was then), it was appropriate to have the first viewing in this city.” He came to the metropolis at the time as a kind of escape from his life in a Delhi that was all about bureaucratic correctness, his father’s name and a turbulent teenage existence. For him, acceptance came, he says, “not for whose son I was, but for my skills and talents”. This exhibition, a “manifestation of my outer world, my associations with the city and its people, known and unknown”, as he himself describes his work, is Bartholomew’s way of “paying my dues to this city and its people” In the process, he managed to not just record his discoveries in black and white film, as a kind of archive of a gentler, more serene and yet vibrant city, but a “place that came to be called home”. In a way these images tell the tale of a significant slice of Bombay’s history, of a time that can never be recaptured, a time that was a kind of bridge between history and progress, between the vestige of a foreign rule and the impersonal face of a modern present.

Of the many originally chosen for the show, there are only about 10-15 images that have not been hung, Bartholomew explains. After all, “You can’t have everything – this is 112 images, quite a huge show in contrast to the 40-60 pictures normally done. I felt that there was so much of the city that I wanted to show, plus there was space that was available and I wanted to configure it densely, since that is also the way the city is. To have that sense of density and show off the subcultures” as ‘sets’ in distinct areas of the gallery “was also what i wanted to do”.

A visitor wanders through those sets, those streets, those subcultures, seeing “some rather obscure architectural details, views and streets, very minimal, no traffic, more of a graphic element, as if you approach the city, as it were. There are shots of sport, old cars, Irani restaurants, the rain, people in the city - the worker, so essential to every function, the dabbawalas, the pushcart guys...There is also a tribute to the old people.” An old man in a solar topi, his face lined with the experience of ages; a watchmaker, sitting at his tiny table, wearing his sadra and cap, bent over his almost-forgotten craft; a wizened couple in a seemingly but deceptively romantic situation, their faces hidden behind a newspaper...

As a whole, the exhibition is tribute to the city itself, its physicality – “open views of the cityscape, the sea with buildings, some at Worli, some at Nariman Point, windows into the walls, more sort of intimate spaces of a city.” Bartholomew has also “built a table with pictures of people –so many who to some degree touched me, and some not at all: poets, writers, theatre people, film people, friends, scattered on that table in a very haphazard manner – something essential to my life in the city.” And there are the sleepers, religious iconography, some things that you see as cutouts, signs, symbols, the inanimate.

As Bartholomew explains, “I think people react to these pictures differently, depending on what vintage they are. If you have been around in the ’70s into the early ’80s and were teenage and above and are now in the 50s like me, it serves as a function of memory, reminds you of certain things that may have happened” around the locations captured on camera. “For younger people, it is a sort of surprise to engage and understand Bombay as it was, and rediscover things that they may not know at all except through what they have heard. It is curiosity, voyeurism, nostalgia - it all depends on what appeals.”