Pramod Kumar KG of New Delhi based museum consultancy Eka curates an exhibition of Hand-colored Photographs at Bhagwat Prakash Photo Gallery inside the premises of City Palace Museum to revive the synapse between painting and photography. Scheduled to be inaugurated on 25th of this month at 09:35 am, “Tinted by Tradition” will continue till March 31, 2012.
This exposition puts up the age old tradition of adding a layer of color to the printed photographic image that finds its birth in the early years of the invention of modern photography in 1839. It displays the works of Waswo X. Waswo and Rajesh Soni that has been inspired from the large oeuvre of work maintained at Pictorial Archives of Maharanas of Mewar. Waswo’s digitally printed studio portraits have been hand coloured by Rajesh Soni, an artist with his roots in Udaipur, whose grandfather Prabhu Lal Verma was a well known artist-photographer in the court of Maharana Bhupal Singh. Waswo says of his work, “In Udaipur I hoped to revisit the territory of late 19th century and 20th century photography, both paying homage to, and also playfully mocking, the genre as practiced by foreign ethnographers and Indian Studio portraitists alike.”
City Palace Museum has always caught hold of many eyes with its holdings of rich culture and archives that take you in a journey to the past, a journey inside the royalties and culture of Mewar kings. The Bhagwat Prakash Photo Gallery was established in the Zenana Mehal present within the courtyards of City Palace Museum in March 2009 that endures the Pictorial Archives of the Maharanas of Mewar. These arrays of photographic materials are made available for research scholars, and through various exhibitions for the tourists visiting museum and also for wider community.
