Showcase: Familiar yet distant

Pablo Bartholomew's photographs of old Bombay could easily belong to the now.

Pablo Bartholomew's Eunuch and the mirror from the series Chronicles of A Past Life: Bombay

From awkwardly dressed movie extras to shiny new Air India and Express buildings, this particular collection of Pablo Bartholomew's photographs captures a city in transition. This is Mumbai when it was still Bombay; when it was taking its first steps towards the bustling, glitzy, fast paced metropolitan it would later become.

Titled “Chronicles of a Past Life: Bombay”, the photographs span Bartholomew's time in the city during the 1970s and 1980s. While his earlier exhibition, “Outside In: A Tale of 3 Cities” showcased his inner world through shots of family and friends, the body of work in this exhibition “is a manifestation of his outer world”. Even while the gallery is lined with grainy black and white photographs that document the lives of strangers, the intimate quality of Bartholomew's work is retained. Every frame seems to establish a connection between the subject and the photographer, and some of that intimacy creeps into the end result, making every person you see in the photographs feel familiar.

Taken in the years before Bartholomew had to abandon the documentary phase of his work in black and white and make the switch to photo-journalism, these photographs chronicle a past life, both of the city and its inhabitants as well as of the man behind the lens. Through these pictures, Bartholomew pays his tribute to a city he fell in love with. Every image is laced with nostalgia, and every photograph is a quick journey into the past, making the yearning for it almost palpable.

Bartholomew not only documents a world long gone; he captures the city along with its dreams and ambitions. You see Worli still under construction and aged extras surrounding Amitabh Bachan on the sets of a movie. There are ambassador cars and painted movie posters, all from an era both familiar and distant. While the backdrops to each image is like a period film set, the people seem much too familiar, lending an almost timeless quality to the photograph. There are roadside coolies, rag pickers and street children. You see a man sleeping on the beach, a couple of old Parsi beggars, an empty, desolate sea, a eunuch applying make up, hippies in cafés. They could be people you come across every day on the streets. They could easily belong to the now.

Bottomline: A quick journey into Mumbai.

Chronicles of A Past Life: Bombay;

Pablo Bartholomew, Photoink Gallery, 1, Jhandewalan, Faiz Road, New Delhi. Until March 24 from 11.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m.