ZENDO –A QUIET ELEGANCE
The great photographer Imogen Cunningham said, “There are fewer good photographers than painters. There is a reason. The machine does not do the whole thing.”
At the Birla Academy of Arts & Culture, Kolkata, Prabir Purkayastha's ‘Zendo' brought alive a spiritual experience as he echoed Cunningham's words. A photographer for more than 20 years Prabir Purkayastha is India's Ansel Adams. At the Birla Academy Prabir gives you Ladakh as if it is a set of black and white relics; or colour as an incantation, but it is the image of Maitreya that draws devotion and a worshipful silence. And Prabir's story is one for the Gods and Buddhist believers. Prabir had gone to an old and desolate monastery, which had a 16ft tall bronze statue of Maitreya in Basgo. The body was in the hall while the shoulders and head extended upwards into a glass-fronted attic. “As I looked upon the radiant face, glowing like burnished gold, in the rays of the setting sun, I saw tears – molten and shining – streaming down the cheeks!” says Prabir as he rapidly took photographs. “Tears, just like yours and mine.”
A few weeks later, Prabir went back . This time, he got a shock: “I saw golden rays of sunbeams streaming from Maitreya's eyes — glowing like a million suns all blazing together,” he says. “The tears had dried up but His eyes were alight with wonderment. I always show this picture, with the light shining in Maitreya's eyes, in all my exhibitions.”
As Purkayastha trekked the arid, rugged terrain of Ladakh, he was mesmerised by the silences he witnessed. “The silence in Ladakh is Biblical, like the book of Genesis, when nothing moved and the light of God covered the face of the Earth,” he says. That element of depth in spiritual sojourn brought out different avatars, and Prabir felt akin to emerging from the cradle of this silence.
Ladakh unravels like a tapestry that moves from darkness to light,where life has been coloured and modulated by the great earth gesture of the Himalayas. The dunes, the landscape, the arid monochromatic magnificence reflects a metaphysical momentousness that is rare and brooding.
Prabir's images of the rocks in the lake, smoothened into sensuous sublimation look like earthstones in a bedrock. The prayer flag flying in the wind, the barren mountainscapes with cumulus clouds floating high creates the perception of photography being a truly fine art built on the edifice of elegance. The depth and grain of greys is what seeps through like the skin of the sublime. Over the years, Prabir has gone through many experiments, with films and processing techniques, and used Kodak Technical Pan film. He uses only ambient light, at a select time of the day or year. His portraits have a dark, sombre appearance where highlights and shadows glow like polished pearls. His landscapes look like charcoals captured in chiaroscuro. No digital tricks, no manipulation, just pure photography!
Prabir's photography occupies the interstitial space between documentation and the more expressive, imaginative arts. Though some landscapes seem to be from another world, they hold the tangible warmth of human presence: the people themselves often seem inseparable from the shadows and topography that frames them. Each image, imbued with an air of spiritual rooted-ness and ancient wisdom, appears to hold a secret waiting to be discovered.
This primitive land of wind-swept plateau and snow-scarred deserts spread across the towering citadels of the Great Himalayan and Karakoram ranges gently erases your sense of time and self, and you become one with this pilgrim as he travels through this enchanted land. Andrew Harvey, the scholar, poet and writer who toured Ladakh in the early '80s, writes in ‘A Journey in Ladakh': “This wilderness of rock and light has not been tamed. It remains exalted and sometimes frightening.” Prabir goes beyond to give us the spiritual realms of Ladakh in the word Zendo.
“Zendo is a Japanese word for an ancient meditation hall suffused with energy. I wanted to show the latent and haunting beauty of Ladakh and I compared this mystical land to the sacred zendo,” says Prabir.