KARACHI: The advent of smartphones and their in-built cameras has enabled everyone to become a photographer. It’s not that easy. Photography is not merely putting an image or an action scene into a frame and reproducing it in a one-dimensional, that’s-how-it-happened way. It is about capturing a moment in time by allowing the viewer to understand the backstory as well as the probable future consequence of the captured moment. The veracity of this observation can be gauged from a two-person show which is under way at the Chawkandi Art Gallery.

The participating photographers, Maria Waseem and Qamar Baroocha Bana, are interested in the backstories of the people and scenes that they arrest, and that’s what makes the exhibition pretty good for viewing. Maria, who has named her part of the show ‘Still-Life’, has a special knack for going beyond the apparent, which is evident from almost each one of her pictures. Let’s begin with an untitled image from Lebanon. These days writers overuse the word ‘poignant’ to highlight sensitive messages that artworks tend to convey. Well, the word can be aptly applied here to the photograph of a young woman resting against a wall on what looks like a road, eyes closed, and a child sleeping next to her. One would have thought that the posture of the two is what Maria was trying to capture. No. It’s the closed eyes of both the woman and the child through which the photographer is letting us know about the situation that they have had to face before they went to sleep. It’s not a rosy situation. To boot, what lies ahead of them does not seem to be a smooth ride too. Maria has told us a short story in a single Majid Majidi-like cinematic frame.

Bana’s ‘Khul Ja Sim Sim’ segment of the display is a study of cultural nuances of societies — both the society she belongs to and the one she experienced as a visitor. The photographer’s black and white photos lend sharpness to her subjects, be they the chalking on a cinema wall or a pathway in Morocco.

The exhibition will conclude on Nov 10.

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2017