Prabuddha Dasgupta

Prabuddha Dasgupta ( 1956 –  2012) was a noted fashion and fine-art photographer from India.Known for his iconic black and white imagery, he had an extended career, primarily as a fashion photographer, spanning more than three decades. Amongst his books, he is most known for Women (1996), a collection of portraits and nudes of urban Indian women.

"Every photograph is an elaborate conversation in itself, but Prabuddha is only listening. It is because of this that the photographer’s gaze, while soaking in these time-worn interiors and photographing these time-ridden protagonists, is non-judgmental, with great dignity. It’s almost protecting, the way he seems to look at them, the vulnerability of this community meeting his own vulnerability as an artist. His craft is carefully studied, but his vision, intuitive, without pretence. The consciousness with which every subject is photographed is palpably.

His craft is carefully studied, but his vision, intuitive, without pretence. The consciousness with which every subject is photographed is palpably engrained within every frame. And yet, this is a work that brings forth the subconscious. It’s about memory and loss, both theirs and his, and maybe our own. It is intriguing to correlate the multiple strands that run within Edge of Faith, the portraits, the interiors, the presence, the absence. Two men pose together, as do two women, they are identical seeming people posing identically, almost Arbusian in nature, and yet, both photographs completely unrelated to each other, shot at different villages at different times.

Like different stanzas of the same poem, as he had once said, or like serendipity, that beautiful, intangible occurrence, which is also the name of the art festival, where this work will be shown this month. Sensuality and grace, sensitivity and beauty, are platitudes that are often used to look back at the remarkable legacy that is PDG. But beyond it all, his journey, both in his personal projects and in his commissioned work, has always explored the delicate nature of fragility. In Edge of Faith, it is their memories that are fragile, as past tussles with present, and a generation that has lived through Portugal and India, liberation and today, ponders over its cultural identity. If the documentary nature of the project may seem a little prosaic, it is Prabuddha’s response to it that makes it poetic, whether it is the character on their faces or that, in their spaces. A wall in one photograph with its artifacts, in conversation with another wall of another photograph, both, again, unconnected, both, with their own sea of stories."(betterphotography.in)

Photography