French photographer Geoges Gaste’s century-old images capture various moods alongghats, cities and villages. Shrabasti Mallik reports
In a black and white photo, a girl stands at the bank of the Yamuna with Taj Mahal in the backdrop. The caption reads Sita’s Terrace. Another image Pilgrims by the Ganges, Benaras beautifully captures the bustling ghats of the city. These photographs reflect the way famous French artist and photographer Georges Gasté saw India in 1906. An exhibition at Gallery Romain Rolland, Alliance française de Delhi, displays 34 of his photographs that he took in India from the period of 1905 to 1910.
The exhibition is curated by Aude de Tocqueville, an expert on Oriental paintings of the artist. “It was when I was doing my research on Georges Gasté’s life that I came across two wooden boxes, hidden in an attic, that hadn’t been touched for 100 years. They contained 250 photos on glass plates, taken by him in India. Each was more beautiful than the last and each shared a beautiful story that reflected the sensitivity of a passionate person who had great love for the local people whom he lived with,” she said. Gasté’s love for the common can be seen in the picture of asadhu (hermit), his face covered in ash, meditating. The photograph is also unique owing to the fact that it was taken in the dark, with just the right amount of light to highlight the subject. “He loved to play with lights and created shadows when he was taking photos,” she added.
The selected photographs speak volumes about how the Indian society looked at that time. “He did not concentrate on the landscapes as much as he did on the fine details of everyday life,” said the curator and added that the photographs on display show people, local markets, the crowd on the streets, temples and architecture. “His great sense of composition was his style. His unique mastery of light turned his photos into works of art. He had a very artistic eye and tried to capture reality as much as possible,” she added. Some of the exhibits are amazingly modern in the way they depict everyday life. A man rowing his boat in a river with a long wooden stick and a turbaned man gazing out into the distance from the terrace of a palace reflect the artist’s thought.
In the myriad Indian landscape of India, Gasté found meaning. Aude shared, “He was ahead of his time and had a reporter’s eye.” She recollected her first trip to Agra and Madurai a few days ago and her astonishment to find similarities with Gasté’s photographs which were taken almost a century ago. “The banks of the Yamuna are still the same and the atmosphere that Gasté captured around the Meenakshi temple has not changed a bit,” she said.
According to Aude, Gasté’s love for India started to develop when he read the description of the place in French novelist Pierre loti’s books. “He came to Agra in 1905 where he spent the more beautiful years of his life,” she said. It was at the banks of the Yamuna that he painted some of his beautiful pieces. There was a brief period in 1907 when Gasté went back to Paris owing to some family issues. The artist, however, returned to Madurai in 1908, where he fell in love with the Meenakshi Temple and lived there till his last.
Aude agreed to curate the exhibition because she wanted to show to Indian people what the country and its people were like so many years ago. She said, “It is an honest attempt to show the people their own land through the eyes of a Frenchman.”
Gasté was highly educated. “He did not care about the artistic trends of his time and followed his own nomadic path,” Aude said. One sentence, found in his correspondence, perfectly describe the man and his work — Painting, like photography, should reveal character, passion and feeling rather than the picturesque, which is quite useless, when compared to what speaks to the soul.