Look too closely at Sebastian Cortés’ streetscapes depicting houses in turquoise, fuchsia pink and pistachio green and you begin to wonder if some unreported geological calamity resulted in the continent of Europe crashing into western India centuries ago. How else do you explain the Venetian styled-palazzos depicted in the photos, which line not canals, but the streets of Sidhpur in Gujarat? The colours are not the only anomaly — the floral patterns on the exteriors seem a hybrid of Shekhawati and the baroque architecture of medieval Europe.
There are undoubtedly more prosaic reasons; the mercantile community of Bohra Muslims who built these handsome homes were influenced by Europe. But this exhibition by Tasveer at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad museum in Mumbai is so sumptuous that everyday explanations pale when paired with the photographs. There is one, for instance, that shows a boy leaning against a cart drawn by a camel set against what one guesses is the back porch of one of these mansions. The boy is dwarfed by the camel. The camel in turn is dwarfed by the buildings. Nothing appears to be done to scale.
Cortés does photograph some of the matriarchs of Sidhpur looking straight at the camera, but his strength is to capture women in Sidhpur seemingly unawares — looking out the window in one frame, waiting at the door in another. There are also striking photos of women performing mundane chores —notably a woman cooking on the floor on a two-ringed gas stove right next to an exuberantly sculptured marble fireplace whose mantel is being used to place clay matkas for water. One of the most unusual is of an angelic little boy reclining on a divan. His expression is so befuddled, his dress so traditional and so pristine that after gawping at this photo for several minutes, you will conclude that a giant cuckoo clock has deposited the little boy on the sofa when the clock struck twelve. ... Cortés is an exceptional photographer blessed with painterly brushstrokes of rich detail, but he asks for too much. If a time machine transported us to a setting this grand in a town that bears no resemblance to the present or the country it is situated in, the only truthful response would be incomprehension.