The Harrington Street Arts Centre presents exhibitions by Richard and Pablo Bartholomew

26th Aug 2010

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© Richard Bartholomew

The Harrington Street Arts Centre takes great pleasure in bringing to Kolkata, India, two photography exhibitions; one by the renowned art critic, Richard Bartholomew and the second by his son, the legendary photojournalist, World Photography Academy member and 2010 Sony World Photography Awards judge Pablo Bartholomew.

A publication, titled The Way We Were with an insightful essay by art critic, Geeta Kapur on the photographs by the father and son will be released at the Opening Reception (published in 2010 by Photoink).

‘A CRITIC’S EYE’
Photographs by Richard Bartholomew

A writer, art critic, curator, painter and poet, is how Bartholomew is remembered. Bartholomew's love for literature and art remained lifelong companions and he became one of the finest voices in art criticism in India. He was one of the first art critics to start a serious dialogue with the painters of his time. He created a community with them and engendered a sense of direction at a time when the public was not fully receptive to the bold artistic exploration of India's Progressive Art Movement. His photographs however, remained a more private introspection of life around him and were rarely exhibited. Twenty-four years after his death, we visit his archive and discover an intense and sophisticated eye that provides a rare glimpse into the beginnings of Modernism in India. He recorded art and its practitioners with a custodian's eye. Ever watchful and yet unobtrusive, like the man he intrinsically was, Bartholomew perhaps understood the evidentiary and historical role of the photograph. That many of the artists he photographed became significant underscores the importance of his archive today. When he photographed his wife
 and sons, the same watchful eye sought comfort in observing, but from a distance. He watched them He watched them sleep and read books as the years went by and the photographs are unusually tender and yet unsentimental. When he photographed on his travels in India and abroad, his attention to the banal detail reinforced his profound engagement with photography. He looked for the peculiar, the mundane and configured it with meaning that only a highly attuned mind would.

Richard Bartholomew’s book titled, Critic’s Eye (published in 2009 by Chatterjee & Lal, Photoink and Sepia) will be available at the gallery.

‘A TALE OF THREE CITIES’
Photographs by Pablo Bartholomew

Representing his earliest documentary photography, these prints remain as apropos today as they were then. There is an acute absence of documentation of changing urban India in these two decades, particularly Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta, the three cities referenced in the title. This body of photographs, serves as a chronicle of the cities' shifting nature, character and function. As testimony to the enduring value of his images, these records of urban life have immediacy, an ability to make the "past" contemporary to the viewer.

Primarily, however, these photographs are witness to the flux in the social and cultural landscape at that point; through the uniquely personal filter of images of the artist's self-portraits, friends, family and social milieu. In this exhibition, Pablo Bartholomew's is the floating, nomadic world of his teens, of psychedelic lifestyles and of his presence within what he refers to as "the first free-thinking generation after Independence" – a world he had personal exposure to as the son of Richard Bartholomew, preeminent art critic, curator, poet and photographer and mother, Rati Bartholomew, a well known personality in the theatre and literary circles in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. These photographs are notes from his diary enacting personal dialogs, which inadvertently connect to a universal, cross-generational ethos.

Pablo Bartholomew’s publication titled, A Tale of Three Cities (published in 2008 by Bodhi Art) will be available at the gallery.

For more information about the exhibitions, visit www.bartholomew.tv