Image is the story: Pallon Daruwala chooses colour of Diu

Eschewing the usual, Pallon Daruwala chooses yellow, the dominant colour of Diu to show its changing landscape

December 11, 2017 05:50 pm | Updated December 12, 2017 11:39 am IST

Pallon Daruwala is a sucker for black and white photography but his latest body of work is steeped in various shades of yellow. The colour dominates the landscape of Diu, where the fine art photographer shot this work. When a commissioned assignment for a Lisbon-based gallery didn't work out, Pallon decided to shoot the sleepy relatively unknown island anyway. The collection of 27 images titled ‘Yellow’ are displayed at Crimson Gallery in the city.

The well-known industrial and architecture photographer trained his lens on nature and what interested him the most was the architecture in the former Portuguese colony.

The Portuguese Fort, the prison, Naida caves, crumbling houses, trees and sea shore figure in the narrative. Nuanced textures on the walls of the caves and capturing of details like a sapling sprouting on a tree bark, a natural formation inside the cave, make it a fine work of art.

The story of this Union Territory located below Gujarat, on the Arabian Sea Coast is that of its losing touch with its past. “The old architecture, old houses built with yellow stones is going away. I wanted to capture what was here before before it all disappears. The conservation efforts going on are not enough. The Fort is in a bad shape and one private individual is trying to preserve an old bungalow. What is going on is repair, not restoration,” says the lensman.

It is the form that takes precedence over anything else in Pallon’s works printed on canvas. “The story can’t eclipse everything else for me. The composition has to be perfect,” says Pallon, who had his last show ‘The Living Forest’ in the same gallery in 2015.

For fine art photography, Pallon believes the photographer has to take control of a lot of things, even printing. “Only I know what I saw. Only I saw those different hues of sunlight entering these caves and their effect on the ceiling and its walls. And I want to show exactly what I saw. And for that, I need to print the works myself.”

While he does commercial work to earn his bread and butter, Pallon says, his personal projects such as these give succour to his soul.

The exhibition is on at Crimson, Hatworks Boulevard, Cunnigham Road, till December 25

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