Exhibition: ALANG – Between Man, Nature & Steel - Invisible Photographer Asia (IPA)

PIX Vol 10 : Habitat
ALANG, Shovan Gandhi

Friday, May 9, 2014 at 7:00 pm at the Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi

The Alang exhibition draws attention to our notions of the exotic in the 21st Century, concerning globalization and it’s relationship between Nature, Man and Steel.

Photographed over a period of seven years against the backdrop of a gentle sea and otherwise empty beach, this collection is a tangible representation of my encounter with the visually fantastic.

This is Alang, a town on the coast of Gujarat, where the landscape is dominated, defined and demographically shaped by its industrial function of ship breaking. This requires inconspicuous workers clad in overalls and hard-hats appearing as nameless, haunting spectators to these industrial units in disrepair.

For many viewers from the subcontinent this collection of the photographs portray salient strains of an almost Dickensian Industrialism, a prevailing socio-economic ecosystem in which unimportant men can aggregate and die so that dead ships live.

Shovan Gandhi’s work is drawn from his background in fine art photography, new media and painting. He works with a spectrum of production techniques and formats, ranging from pinhole cameras to conventional digital media, to build a narrative between the viewer and the image. His work has appeared in Vogue, Motherland, Marie Claire, BBC, Platform, The Caravan, Elle, Frontline, Grazia. He lives and works in New Delhi, India.