The Bad Boy Gifted A Good Eye

Photographer Bharat Sikka is billed as one of the best of his generation. As he prepares for a new solo show, SHOMA CHAUDHURY tracks the story of his imagination

RICH CHOREOGRAPHED pictures of Indian men. Bleak urbanscapes. Mysterious figures in a village, illuminated by a kind of focused light. Seductive women captured against bizarre pseudo-narratives. Photographer Bharat Sikka has shot professionally for some of the most prestigious magazines in the world. His projects ‘Indian Men’ and ‘Space In- Between’ have been internationally acclaimed. And on October 24, he will open a new, highly personal solo show, ‘Road to Salvador du Mundu’ at the Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi.

Yet, but for a chance encounter in Class VI, Sikka could’ve ended up just another angry, vaguely dysfunctional Punjabi man. The son of an army officer, at 11, Sikka had found himself stranded in Laxman Public School in New Delhi. For a boy wretchedly bad at his books there was not much to do save pick fights in the yard. But through all the mediocre cacophony of the school, an Oriya art teacher, Prabin Badia, noticed the bad boy could draw.

A misfit himself, Badia changed Sikka’s life. He gifted him the idea of ‘difference’, of being constructively at odds with the world. “You don’t have to be like everyone else,” he said. “But you have to study enough to hold your own.” One inspired day, Badia insisted they walk the streets, noting sights and textures, ending up finally at the National Gallery of Modern Art. “He didn’t let us use a bus or auto; it was night by the time we got back. It’s more than 25 years ago but I remember it vividly,” says Sikka.

Wish Buttons A man in an elevator from the ‘Indian Men’ series

Some Place Else A man, distracted from his work? From the ‘Indian Men’ series

Signs of Travel A man in his bedroom from the ‘Indian Men’ series

New Lives A still from ‘Families’

The vacant lot A still from ‘Space in-Between’

Nurture and slaughter A still from Road to ‘Salvador du Mundu’

Today, at 37, Sikka has all the ammunition necessary to announce conventional arrival. He is part of the coveted Julian Meijer agency; PDN featured him as one of 30 most talented Emerging Photographers in 2002; Flash Art listed him among its 50 most Influential Photographers in 2003, and in 2005, he won a Best Photograph award from Time magazine. Director Photoink, Devika Daulet Singh calls him a kind of “Alec Soth in our part of the world.”

But if Sikka had been interested in mere arrival, he could have got there much earlier. By the late 90s, he was already pretty sought after in Indian fashion circles and the money was rolling in nicely. But precisely as the curve began to peak, Sikka suddenly felt he didn’t want to be doing that routine. Driven by the sense that he was “missing something”, in 2000, he left his wife in India and enrolled himself in the Parson’s School of Design in New York.

Parson’s shook out all his certitudes. Sikka found himself in an uber-creative fraternity, where everyone was equally restless and seeking. “They grilled me; they looked at my fashion work and said, what is this crap, what does it mean. Basically, they taught me to think,” says Sikka.

Intellect is not the first attribute you would accord Sikka. In fact, at first encounter — with his wave of astonished hair and tremulous, abstracted air — Sikka is deceptively unimpressive and inarticulate. But a longer conversation reveals the qualities that distinguish his work: yes, a capacity to think, the cour - age to break stride, and the integrity to keep searching. Technical brilliance — which he has in abundance — becomes almost incidental.

Inevitably, Sikka’s first pro - ject ‘Indian Men’ — portraits of ordinary middle-class Indians — was born out of his stint at Parson’s. He’d been away from India for two years; life in New York had been tough — long hours, loneliness and very little money. The masters had been pushing hard, urging students to find what it is they uniq - uely had to say. On a trip home, suddenly it all came together. The years away had created a rupture: Sikka had acquired an outsider’s eye, enough to notice things, as he says, “we are ordinarily numb to.” Globalisation had just begun to kick in: fathers-inlaws were wearing Nikes beneath their pyjamas. This set him off on lush, ironic portraits that captured Indian men — in themselves an unusual subject — at a point of transition, and somehow made them visible for the first time. Sikka’s own experience of isolation imbued the pictures — otherwise hinting affectionately at new vanities and ambition — with a plangent loneliness. Almost all the portraits have men placed in front of open doors and windows, suggesting vast freedoms and fresh horizons, linked inevitably with an undertow of sadness.

This was an India that had not even begun to recognise itself: the West was excited: it flung open its doors. But Prabuddha Dasgupta, who Sikka first apprenticed with, feels a “certain Americanism had crept into his imagination. He is among the most talented in his generation, but that kind of alienation is not true of India,” says he. Sikka argues the emotion was his, but admits to strong aesthetic influences — in particular, Edward Hopper and Philip- Lorca diCorcia, with their highly staged compositions, rich colours and intricate use of light and shadow.

With offers pouring in, Sikka could have stuck to the gravy train. Instead, he returned to India. “It was important for me personally to be part of what was happening in India. Technically, it’s very easy for me to make a good-looking picture, so I have this ability to take shortcuts. But you have to look for what you really want to say,” says he. “That’s the key.”

Courage is a quality everyone readily grants Sikka. His next project, ‘Space in-Between’, was radically different. Deliberately muted, colourless, foggy, Sikka shot disquieting urbanscapes in Delhi and Gurgaon that did not merely record a burgeoning glitz, or easy contradictions of rich and poor. He set out to capture the “gap in between.” “Societies must evolve organically,” says he, “there is a process to it, but psychologically, structurally and socially we have just skipped entire rungs and gone straight from two to ten.”

A metro flyover speeding into the horizon flanked by dirt tracks on either side and an eerie vacum in between. Puddles in muddy grounds stretching before the faint mirage of skyscrapers. A forlorn tarpaulin shed. Images reeking of the unsaid, of the hollow within, yet so familiar and mundane they befuddle. Why take such a picture? What’s the big deal? As Prabuddha says, “Personally, I don’t like this new conceptual photography where you need to know what the photographer intellectually intended.”

Sikka is calm about the criticism. “Even if people didn’t like the pictures, it doesn’t matter, at least the image is embedded in their minds and the next time, they’ll recognise the phenomenon,” says he. “Why are we trying to ape a Singapore? If this is the way we are going, we’ll lose everything. We have to embed what we are culturally into how we grow, we have to think it through,” says he.

Artist or photographer? Since he first quit his lucrative career to join Parson’s, the dilemma of who he should be pursues Sikka. Devika Daulet Singh, who hugely admires Sikka’s control of the difficult medium format camera and his instinctive capacity to configure a picture, feels that until he completely “closes the tap” to the fashion world, he will not find his true individual voice. Gallerist Peter Nagy of Nature Morte, however, admits to being a fan of Sikka’s fashion photography, which shares an aesthetic with Guy Bourdin, the moody, disconcerting photographer who shot his models in the middle of complex narratives — often surreal, shocking, or plain sinister.

But Sikka’s own search has brought him, once again, to a radically new piece of work: ‘Road to Salvador du Mundu’, a short story told in pictures. A couple of years ago, Sikka and his pregnant fashion designer wife, Ameet had bought an old house in a Portuguese village in Goa. “It was raining heavily. The house smelt musty. You could sense the insects and scorpions everywhere,” says Sikka. Spooked, he urged his wife to leave the house and go back to a hotel. ‘Road to Salvador du Mundu’ emerged from the psychological claustrophobia of that night. Dark, gritty, lit only in intense patches, it is unlike any of Sikka’s earlier work. “There is a story to it, but I don’t really want to talk about it because I want audiences to read their own stories into it,” says Sikka.

Meanwhile, his search for his own voice continues. In an age of instant communication, to be an original is almost impossible, and a voice must, of necessity, be a conversation with others. But even more than his many other gifts, the integrity of his seeking sets Sikka apart.