Prabuddha Dasgupta

Prabuddha Dasgupta’s Edge of Faith is a remarkably ruminative document of a lived experience. Raj Lalwani muses on the journey of the visual poet of melancholy.

- Raj Lalwani

Writing on the work of Prabuddha Dasgupta is a little like writing a tell-all memoir. However much one may try to look at things objectively, it’s inevitable that the memories will be faded, coloured,sentimental, and yet, to recount them, to put them together, is a matter of both joy and anguish.

I already know this. I have probably been writing on his photographs from the time I first saw them, only, the writing was always in my head. For that’s exactly what his photographs tend to do, they draw out your deepest memories, and sink in new ones. They are, as said, a matter of both joy and anguish.

In the few conversations we had had before he moved on, and the several I have had since, with his photos, it were always questions that were discussed, and never really their answers. Our thoughts would wander and meander, never to reach a finality, a conclusion. I had come away after our very first meeting enthused and yet, confused. We spoke so much, and yet spoke so little.

But that was who he was. And who he was, was how his pictures were. He was erudite in the assessment of his own practice, but the assurance in his timbred voice was always accompanied by questions. By possibilities. By a series of what ifs. Much like his photographs, which until his final work Longing, were always about a certain subject matter, about an assured subject, and yet, they were always beyond subject matter. His subjects were women, Ladakh and Catholics in Goa, but what he was photographing was sensuality and harshness, beauty and the lack thereof, history and modernity, hope and despair… often in the same photograph.