Tales Of Chitpore - Photography Exhibition by Saibal Das October 16, 2009

Tales Of Chitpore - Photography Exhibition by Saibal Das. Tales of Chitpore - Artist's statement : I started off to photograph Chitpore in the spirit of a flaneur as Charles Baudelaire saw it - 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'. Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography, describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flaneur. The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flaneur finds the world 'picturesque'. Saibal Das (b.1960) based in Kolkata, is not a photographer by chance, but has been handling the camera since his childhood days. He has inherited the love for photography from his father who also had lifelong loyalty towards the mesmerizing medium of light and shadow. Saibal has been working with a number of known publications like the ABP, India Today, and Outlook since his early days. He is an internationally acclaimed visual chronicler and has won numerous accolades in his field like the UNESCO award and the National Media Fellowship from National Foundation for India (NFI). He has traveled extensively to countries like Afghanistan, China, Japan, Bangladesh etc. to document important events and his work has been exhibited and acclaimed in India (Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Kolkata) and internationally (China and Japan). Saibal's current project of visually recording Chitpore, the most vibrant road of Kolkata, has already attracted much attention and accolade and has also been published in the prestigious GEO magazine. He is much in love with the city which has remained an infinite source of inspiration to him for many years and intends to depict her various moods.

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