A matter of chance

Kapil Das's mix of personal and 'public' photographs showcased at the '154 Neshvilla Road and other Stories' exhibition shows that chance has played its part. And alongwith that — his art. Paramita Ghosh reports.

Sometimes, a photographic cliché — being at the right place at the right time — is, perhaps, the only explanation for a good picture. Kapil Das's mix of personal and 'public' photographs showcased at the '154 Neshvilla Road and other Stories' exhibition shows that chance has played its part. And alongwith that — his art.

Small-town India with its indefinable charms and the private drama of middle-class Indian homes — in this case his own — has yielded many interesting pictures. Das clearly has an eye for the peculiar and idiosyncratic; he uses humour to heighten those attributes in his subjects.

"I like to see something visually what is not there naturally," says Das of a picture in which he had asked two men who were cutting wood in a forest to cover their eyes with leaves.

Other interesting frames: the kitchen his mother works in; his brother and the dog; the diary of his father and its pages filled with personal notations; a male hero of a wandering theatre company in Gujarat who strikes a pose in the very best traditions of courtly love; a photoclub team from Kolkata looking through their cameras in a remarkably disciplined single file; Wax World, a museum in Ooty in which the wax figure of Bhagat Singh looks like a Bollywood villain; schoolchildren concentrating on a project on neighbourhood waste with a cow's hind as part of the camera frame — all, throw up a view of life that is full of little bursts of unintended theatre.