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Jhalak, Photographs by Shahid Datawala

Jhalak, Photographs by Shahid Datawala

May 16, 2025 – June 15, 2025

Artworks in Exhibition

The camera as a tool of intimacy knows that “to intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity.” The guillotine inspired shutter mechanism that controls both the amount of light and the duration for which it exposes the film. The camera derives its poetic facility from this stage-curtain-like function, that endows the camera to split a moment infinitely and freeze the finest gesture and movement. Gestures and lexicon associated with the camera, still evoke the hunter, hunting, and the hunted, priming it to document not just what exists, but also “the emergent and ephemeral, the sensory, the affective, and the involuntary, all that forces thought.”

Mumbai-based photographer, Shahid Datawala, had a desire in 2018 for intimacy with the city he already knows well, and as a photographer too. Datawala is a photographer-chronicler of Mumbai, exploring its architecture, its decay, its life on and above the streets since the 1990s. Equipped with a digital camera with a 100 mm lens and clad in his signature lungi, Datawala insinuated himself into the bustle of the street, the element or the medium of the flaneur. After a year of, what he describes as discipline, a body of work emerged he calls Jhalak, pairs of images bound by what at first seems a relationship defined by similes and metaphors. Like the orange ice cream stick held upright looks like the bottle a woman holds with orange coloured liquid. An ice cream cone juxtaposed with a shawarma spit, a cockerel’s head with a red comb, wattles, and earlobe placed next to a hand holding a red rose, and such like. A deeper look could make us see parallels with the Imagism of Datawala’s fellow Mumbaiker/Bombayite of an earlier avatar of the city in the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, Bombay, the flaneur-poet, Arun Kolatkar.

Hemant Sareen

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