Beam me up, spider: German photographer gives new perspective to India's monuments

Bengaluru: For photographer Nicolaus Schmidt, the devil is always in the details. But his details bring out an interesting angle to Indian built heritage.

For instance, when zoomed in extra tight, the wooden beam in Karla caves of Maharashtra, one of the famous Buddhist relics from the region, looks almost like an extra-terrestrial spider, huge and glowing in the dark.

"Yes, I have been told that my pictures, particularly that of Jantar Mantar in Varanasi, give a different perspective to well-known monuments in India," said Berlin-based Schmidt, over the phone.

Schmidt will be in Bengaluru, to attend his photo exhibition, India Tecton, being held in collaboration with the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) at Goethe Institut in Bengaluru from May 14 to 27. Schmidt will also conduct an exclusive five-day workshop on photography at MAP.

His book 'India Tecton', which accompanies the exhibition, features nearly 200 photographs of the its built heritage spanning over 2,000 years, which he had taken during the course of his five visits to the country.

"My first book project in India was on its women, right after the horrible rape incident of the young girl in Delhi in 2012. The project was a collaboration with an Indian journalist, Priyanka Dubey. But I have been taking pictures of Indian architecture since the beginning. The pictures of Karla caves, incidentally, gave me the idea of a book. I came to India (to Pune) first in 2011 to visit a friend that I volunteered with way back in 1980s," said Schmidt.

For Schmidt, India’s heritage was an opportunity to understand the country better.

"They are different yet there exist kinships. There is colonial domination. There are social contrasts. It has its own language of modernism, so different from the rest of the world, propagated by the likes of Charles Correa. It is all so fascinating," Schmidt added.

The book really shaped up after his visit to the south, post 2015 "I realised that the difference is so vast between the regions that it is a story by itself," he said.

Thus 'India Tecton' is his eighth book. His first, incidentally, was on break dancers of New York.

"There too, the dancers were propped against historical places and buildings. But my focus was on the dancers. The scenery and architecture served as a podium to celebrate dance,' said Schmidt.

For him, photos are not just for documentation; they are works of art that also document the characteristics of his subjects. His latest project Natura Viva, for instance, which he is aware will not fit into a book, is extreme closeups of tree barks.

Zoomed in, they may not exactly document the trees per se, but Schmidt believes that the texture, the knots and twists found in the bark have their own stories to tell. Incidentally, India Tecton was also shown at the India International Centre in Delhi last November.

"The exhibition was a very interesting experience for me. I am a German. Here I am making a book about Indian buildings. But people understood what I was trying to do, they appreciated a different point of view," he said.

Schmidt said he has no favourites when it comes to building styles.

"I like some very old ones and some new ones. There are some really brilliant monuments here. But the built heritage in India in general is not very well maintained. I visited a palace in Patiala, it was almost in ruins. I felt very sorry to see that. I have also seen modern buildings, may be only 10 years old, also beginning to fall apart," Schmidt said.