Finding his own Space
Architect-photographer Romil Sheth is acutely intent in recreating a slice of the world through his lens. GEETA DOCTOR reviews his exhibition, 'Explorations of the Familiar' that opened in Chennai and which will travel around the country.

He could be a cat among the rooftops of Mumbai. Or a dancing mote of dust catching the early morning light as it filters in through a curtain in his parents' bedroom and creating dizzying catch-me-if-you-can patterns of light and shade against the window.

Or maybe just a grasshopper lurking in the green grass amidst circular forms of garden chairs that crash and collide against each other like the pencil drawings made by an architect's compass.

Romil Sheth is both preternaturally still, hence the comparison to a cat and acutely intent in recreating a slice of the world through his lens. It's a photographic journey that documents the world as he sees it through the by-lanes and back-alleys of the real world as well as the imaginary one that he has created in his portraits that have been grouped together in the exhibition named, "Explorations of the Familiar" under the categories of "People Places and Patterns". It opened at Chennai under the auspices of the Prakriti Foundation and will travel around the country.

An architect by profession, Sheth was spurred into taking pictures when he joined the School of Architecture at Ahmedabad and he was plunged into the vortex of studying graphic design, film making, documentation, sketching and so forth, until he decided that what he really needed to do was to take pictures.

There are images of extraordinary intimacy as in the black and white picture he has taken of his mother in a moment of unguarded repose, as she lies curled in sleep on the floor, (after doing her yoga exercises) beneath the window and a cluttered desk in the narrow space of her bedroom. Or even the picture that he has taken of his parents lolling on their bed looking up at him, thereby reversing the traditional role of the parent fondly recording the form of their offspring via the camera, for the benefit of posterity.

There are crowded let-me-pay-my-homage to Cartier Bresson pictures that capture the din and noise of the Indian street scene. As well as arresting compositions of line and shape and colour (he has not exhibited the colour pictures in the show at Chennai) that show Sheth the architect looking at space in the manner of an Escher, of the steps at the Banganga temple at Mumbai drenched in deep shadows, or even a Rachel Whitbred.

Content reinvented

Just as the British artist Whitbred has explored the idea of unseen space, by taking molds of the area that is trapped underneath the form of different chairs and making them visible by exhibiting these solid forms that she suggests gives a shape to a chair, Sheth looks at a particular room, or window, or grand hall, or staircase and empties it of content. Or perhaps it is not that it is emptied of content, but re-invented in his pictures so that they appear as an abstraction, pure design, or pure colour as he has noted in a series of pictures taken of a window at different times of the year, each picture as different as a Japanese print of the changing seasons of a willow tree or Mount Fuji.

As Ranvir Shah of the Prakriti Foundation, observes in his introduction to the Chennai show: "A practising architect, Sheth's visual oeuvre is conditioned to seeing things at many levels and many places. With people he traverses the category of the photographer as tourist, as reporter, as family and observer and sometimes even borders on that of a voyeur, a term seen in much negativity over the years but that which allows the photographic eye to record images with a paradigm not always safe. He interacts with friends, people on the street, portraits of family and turns rather simplistic events and situations into visuals of layered meaning. Guests at a wedding transform into subjects who are seen by a camera. Grandfathers become models... "

Sheth's black and white photographs straddle the territory between the sudden gaps in the pavement of the ordinary. He could be taking a picture of a crowd of people leaning over the parapet wall overlooking the sea at the Gateway of India, at Mumbai and create a small human drama. In one such portrait Sheth has included the almost casual image of the truncated body of a young man who is the only one looking into the camera lens. Lying on the pavement, it is the ferocious vitality of this young man that grabs the attention. He looks straight at the camera and forces you, the viewer to take note of him. "Don't turn your back to me," he seems to be saying.

Voyeuristic?

Is this voyeuristic, or even worse, opportunistic, in the same way that many observers of the Indian street scene have created their own glossy images of poverty and deprivation to be worn as badges of their own particular sensitivity? Sheth leaves the viewer to decide.

"More than anything else I want my pictures to be spontaneous," he explains tersely. "At some point you do begin to see things in the form of a composition, or as patterns of black and white, but I try very hard not to look for that, to work intuitively, to be as fresh and spontaneous in my response as a child." This is why he finds it so fascinating to record the layer upon layer of images, or objects or pooja offering made at a temple, or implements and toys displayed by a roadside vendor, or the crowded streets around Bhuleshwar in Mumbai, so fascinating. Even in the apparently chaotic or random selection of items that come hurtling at him, Sheth finds a rhythm that only he can track down, or hear. For instance in a collection of chairs that have been left behind on a terrace, the shapes take on the rhythm of a musical score. It may have been done before. Chairs after all form a background score to many of the bla ck and white films made by the New Wave film director in France and certainly they celebrate the sidewalks and cafes of Paris or the beachfronts of Nice or Cannes with insistent regularity. Sheth admits to studying the works of the great masters of 20th century photography and consciously leaving them behind.

It's this tension between his stated need to be spontaneous and his architect's training to find patterns, spaces and counter spaces within this meaningless jumble of shapes that give Sheth's photographs their charm.

"I don't look at space as something static," he immediately clarifies, "I think of space as something that is always in the process of changing, as something dynamic which is always in the process of changing, even as you look at it." This is why in some of his interior shots, there's a sense of presenting multiple perspectives, or as the artist Matisse might have said, each element in the picture is as important as the other.

Romil Sheth's pictures are an invitation to walk in and explore the space that he has created with all the excitement of a photographer who uses his camera with the quiet confidence of an artist and an architect's understanding.