A visual diary of Pablo’s earlier days, Outside In 70s & 80s A Tale of 3 cities… comprises of resonant photographs of people whose youth is variously evoked and celebrated. This work is, at an important level, what Bartholomew calls “documentary photography”, a valuable record of the metropolitan Seventies and Eighties in India. But neither the autobiographical nor the documentary would have been of enduring interest, if both had not been made part of another journey altogether.

As stated by Aveek Sen, “Outside In is, in a moving but ironic sense, a gift of Time – and gifts are always double-edged: they hold us as much as they set us free. Being thrown out of school left Bartholomew with all the time in the world – that was another double-edged gift of time. And it is precisely this “world enough and time” that the successful photojournalist is left bereft of in his relentlessly predatory progress from disaster to death to visiting heads of state. The momentum of his work leaves him with no time to fail, and to reflect uselessly and endlessly on that failure, turning it into beautiful, timeless images”.

A great deal of the personal, aesthetic and historical resonance of Outside In comes from such juxtapositions of absence and presence, of peopled interiors and unpeopled cityscapes or vice versa. But the ‘tale’ that unfolds through these photographs is not just of three cities; instead that of the people, spaces and objects which once vividly present, have now transformed or disappeared and which we too have survived and absorbed.

On viewing these excellent photographs, the sense of our own contemporaneity begins to pull away from the presentness of the present and begins to recede towards the pastness of the past, which suddenly is made the present again.

Bodhi Art has immense pleasure in presenting Pablo Bartholomew’s Outside In 70s & 80s A Tale of 3 Cities at Bodhi Art, New York. The works shall be on view from 8th May to 14th June, 2008. Gallery hours 11am – 6pm (Tuesday to Saturday).