A THOUSAND WORDS

Naveen Kishore's 'vocabulary' finds expression through his ongoing photography exhibition In A Cannibal Time

- Malini Banerjee

Poet, publisher (Seagull Books), photographer, and theatre person Naveen Kishore, 70, wears several hats. It's his photography hat that is currently on display at Emami Art in the Kolkata Centre for Creativity. The exhibition In A Cannibal Time is in collaboration with Chatterjee & Lal (who had taken Kishore's Performing the Goddess to the Cincinnati Art Museum) and is showing at the gallery till June 25. It includes four series: Performing the Goddess, The Green Room of the Goddess, The Epic and the Elusive, and In a Cannibal Time.

According to Kishore, his photographs are happy accidents. This is particularly true for the photographs in The Epic and the Elusive. They were shot over 20 years ago as part of a series for Seagull Theatre Quarterly's issue on theatre in Manipur. "Most of them were experimental takes on Greek classics like Antigone, etc," says Kishore, explaining the 'epic' referred to in the series. What remains 'elusive' are blurred smoke-like figures captured "in a certain kind of motion" in the black and white series. "The act of capturing the actors in motion] was the only thing I was certain of. Since I shoot analogue-it is all chance. I'm capturing her [points out an actor in a picture] in movement while everything else is static. And it resulted in these happy accidents-where one person looks like they are disappearing into smoke, while another looks straight at you giving it a kind of documentary aspect," he explains.