S Viswanath

From a placid, peaceful Pensioner’s Paradise to bustling, boisterous Start-Up Capital – the cosmopolitan, all welcoming, Bengaluru aka Bangalore has witnessed a transformational metamorphosis with furious, fast-paced development as one point agenda.

That the calming, recuperative City of Gardens & Lakes has had to pay a heavy price to keep pace with the Silicon Valleys of the World turning itself in a real estate Armageddonis a disquieting matter. Bursting at its every seams in all directions, the all-embracing accommodative City having lost its vestiges of a glorious eon, it, and its citizens, once sang paeans and proudly preened about.

Even as true blue Bangalorean thirsts for once tranquil, quietude of an Eden now eternally Lost into the annals of time and magical memories, the recent photographic exhibition by Milan, Italianborn Martin Mae, at Sabha blr, the historic conserved and restored 160 year old CVS Sabha Tamil School “a vibrant cultural space that honours it’s legacy while embracing the present, to celebrate art, craft and culture” rekindled nostalgia warming the cockles of the locals who visited the exhibition.

Martin’s thoughtfully clicked images of the Bangalore – entitled metaphorically Bangalore, in Between, led one to Marcel Proust’s passage from his monumental book Remembrance of Things Past: “was it possible to feel nostalgic about something… possible for nostalgia to be taken in by the body to infect the consciousness with stray sentiments?”

“Perhaps,”thanks to Marin’s evocatively conceived photographs, it was possible for one to “travelback in time, or even drifted into another dimension of space-time, experiences, and nostalgia of another. To even envisage so allowed the trauma of those lost moments, perhaps, nostalgia was a microorganism,the bacterium that infected” the soul benignly to reflect in Remembrance of a Bangalore’s Past.

While, at first glance, or impression, Martin’s photographs may look rather whimsical, mundane,quite routine and ordinary with nothing of newness in them that a Bangalorean does not know or seen.

However, with a second and repeated contemplative watch of these very photographs, especially black and white ones, throws up the extraordinary from the ordinary, whose presence is taken for granted by the eyesso used to one’s surroundings and everyday affair.

And therein lies the bewitching quality of Marin’s the outsider’s ocular gaze, through her intuitive and imaginative lens that provide these photographsa special luminance and ethereal quality of their own, long lost to citizens having to sojourn through the diurnal hustle and bustle of life in their fasted pace hectic avocations one leads.

The photographs speak to one like John Milton’s Paradise Lost“Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,this the (Same Bangalore), that has changed from Heav’n, to this mournful gloom” of a City we now reside as reminiscent remanent of a glorious, gentle Cityone knew engulfs you into a murmur of what have we done to our beloved Bengaluru.

Be the line of (fasting vanishing/depleting) trees on street’s kerbsides, or accruement of wayside wayfarer vendor’s wares of mosquito net, bed sheets/rugs, basking under the shade of trees’ foliage on the empty, quite streets and its surroundings and buildings in a throwback to what once Bangalore was once was or may have been speak of the sheer intuitiveness of Martin who has sought to capture the quiet, calm, the serenity as also virtuous green foliage and trees of Bengaluru that gave it the sobriquet of Eden on Earth.

As Martin herself explains, in an interview, the theme of her ensemble photographic essay was to find “myself searching for silence and quiet moments in the chaos and noise,” which finds true reflection in her “imaginative images.”

“These are things that one passes by in our rush lives, and fail to see the beauty of it because we have grown ‘so’ accustomed to it,” describing the welcoming City as one that “gives you space you need to be, what you want to be, and that is what I have attempted to capture,” as if a poetic ode to a City careening towards a more chaotic and cataclysmic future as the last visages of the pleasant past slowly dwindle and diminish by the day.
Though her keen, perspective and lens woman’s eye Martin provides one the twilight of a Bangalore past for us to rejoice in and reflect upon what we have made of Bangalore present. This outsider’s gaze of a City we live and breathe in and have taken for granted seem to beckon us to do something to bring back the quiet, pristine green glory of a City that has turned into one monolith of concrete and plexiglass habitation ridden with high decibel honking, furiously whizzing vehicles, groaning under the heavy weight of the environmental pollution unable to arrest its own destruction in the name of skewed development and economic growth.

The five-day exhibition structured into three specially and specifically curated sections reflecting “a distinct dimension of the City“ – The Stage, The Threshold &The Souls. The first of which is what has been talked and spoken about in this essay on the exhibition and is described as “Bangalore as a stage, portrayed in its emptiness and beauty, through a series of open spaces, its heart, its roads, trees and buildings.”

With “the emptiness and absence of people” in the said section being “intentional” revealing how “Bangalore generously offers space to move, to pause” and “to exist.” “It is a portrait of a City that still carries its original spirit – a place that welcomes you and offers unexpected corners of intimacy, even amidst the chaos.”

Martin’s photographs seem to evoke in us the same sentiments as renowned artist Paul Fernandes’ expressed “if we know and love the City’s past, the chances of knowing the City of the future are brighter,” while, however, bemoaning “once a garden city, a pensioner’s paradise, it’s now a city  that’s growing chaotically,” at a showcase of his Bangalore Then & Now Exhibition.

A graduate of law,Italian-born Martin Mae is a fashion photographer, Martin Mae is an Italian-born fashion photographer who began her journey in Milan, where she graduated in law. driven by her deep passion for visual arts, moved to London to pursue photography, shaping a distinguished career publishing in magazines.

After over a decade in London, Martin began spending extended periods in India. Now based between Sardinia, Milan, and London, her recent work explores themes of belonging, memory, sea-bound identity, and the relationship between territory and self.

Martin was in Bengaluru on the invitation of the Consulate General of Italy in Bengaluru Consul General Alfonso Tagliaferri which commissioned the photographic project under its aegis.

S VISWANATH is a veteran film critic who officiates as JURY at several National & International Film Festivals. He deputises as CHIEF CINEMA CURATOR/PROGRAMMER & CREATIVE ADVISOR for Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes). He also curates & advises on the selection of shorts & documentaries for Bengaluru International Short Film Festival (BISFF). Mr Viswanath is the author of “RANDOM REFLECTIONS: A Kaleidoscopic Musings on Kannada Cinema”.