Here's your chance to see ‘creepy crawlies' in a new light. The Alliance Française de Bangalore is hosting an unusual exhibition —‘Insect o philia', a collection of photographs of the tiny multi-legged creatures that often escape one's notice.
Put together by photographer Sachin, Insect o philia brings you up close and personal with the “beautiful creatures” that Sachin maintains have lives of their own.
“People don't know much about them,” he says. His collection is certainly an illuminating one, an imaginative, sensitive portrayal of phylum Arthropoda as more than just the stuff of encyclopaedias or horror movies.
Through Sachin's lens, insects are hardly pests — some of his photographs portray the wondrous beauty, and fragility, of insect lives.
“A journey towards light”, reads the caption for a photograph of a weaver ant headed for a glowing orb of sunlight. No less powerful for the tiny scale of the scene, the picture presents what appears to be an epic journey, the ant's delicate frame illuminated by the source of light towards which it appears to be gazing. The photograph is more than just a scene clicked at the right time, appearing almost as if it were the photographer's efforts at constructing an elaborate stage, with a larger plot in mind.
Another picture, ‘Dark passion', is deeply moving and slightly funny, freezing within its frame a moment in the love-making of two tiny bugs on a blade of grass. The photograph combines a strange voyeurism and a quiet calm, with the spiky bugs in the foreground cocooned in their private, peaceful world, surrounded by a haze of various shades of green.
Shot using a basic camera, all of the pictures were taken within the compound walls of Sachin's home in Kasargod in Kerala.
But, each shot takes a very long time to capture, as Sachin will testify, and as for his subjects, well, “they don't pose”.
With this in mind, the mugshot of a beetle, titled “If looks could kill”, leaves you with mixed feelings: wondering at how the photographer managed to get so close without frightening it away, revulsion at the beetle's frightening features, outlined in gory detail, and fascination for the fellow creature that inhabits the same planet as you do.
The exhibition is on from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the Atrium of the Alliance Française, until April 17.
