This exhibition may waver in its portraits of people, but it excels in hinting at stories
Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier's ... experiments at Chandigarh spurred a multitude of reactions, from awe and admiration to outrage and heated debate over whether a Western eye was in any way better qualified to design and create a space to which he would undeniably be an outsider. Manuel Bougot’s photographs in Chandigarh: Portrait of a City trace the legacy that Le Corbusier and a cluster of other architects such as Pierre Jeanneret, Sharma/Dethe and J Chowdhury left behind.
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Bougot says that while the tradition in architectural photography has been to eliminate all traces of human occupation or presence, he wanted to present the human element in Le Corbusier’s buildings. To focus on architecture as well as the people who lived in and worked around it. To a point, Bougot succeeds in weaving the lives of people into indifferent concrete spaces. A picture of a room in the High Court shows shelves of dusty, leather-bound law books, grey and dull with age, above which are pasted images of Hindu gods and goddesses, multifarious and vibrantly coloured ...
Where Bougot excels is hinting at stories. Which is why the photographs of private homes in Chandigarh carry a warmth and texture that is absent from the rest. In one image we are treated to the clear expanse of a blue wall, with an arrangement of flowers above a bed, and a painting. In another, a tiny prayer nook with the hint of lace on a chair, an untidy wrap of newspapers. His pictures capture shelves of family photos and heirlooms, and offer a peek into an intimate arrangement of rooms and lives. There are echoes of Dayanita Singh’s Privacy in these photographs even if the interiors explore the effects of Le Corbusier’s style on personal homes rather than opulent luxury. Try as he might though, architecture still forms the primary focus of his images—the clean sweep of lines, the strong curve of a staircase, the elegant arc of a ceiling, the marvellous symmetry of a space. He is unafraid too of showing the debilitating effects of time and climate on something as strong and solid as concrete. Which explains why, at the end, you are left with a sense of disjunction, of how things—nations, people, cities, ideas—start out and where they end up, always somehow less and not enough. What is it that hangs over Chandigarh? Indifference? Defiance?1
- 1. source: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/arts/chronicles-of-chandigarh