Thursday, December 22, 2011

The India Song Project: Reinventing the Panchatantra

The Danzinger Gallery in New York, currently has an exhibition of stunning images by photographer Karen Knorr. She traveled to North India to photograph some of our most beautiful forts and palaces and then digitally inserted photographs of animals (also photographed by her earlier). 

The Queen's Room, Udaipur City Palace

Takhat Vilas, Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur

This series titled 'India Song', has recently been nominated for the 2012 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize- one of Europe's most prestigious awards for photography. 

Samode Palace

Udaipur City Palace

Karen has made a special effort to capture the mardana and zanana  spaces in the Mughal and Rajput buildings that she photographed. Traditionally, the men spent most of their time in the mardana spaces and in the zanana- the women. You can read more about that here

Humayun's Tomb, New Delhi

Aam Khas, Junha Mahal, Dungarpur

This last image might be familiar to most of you. It grazed Elle Decor's (India) cover for their 10th Anniversary issue. On a personal note, I would like to thank Kamini for mailing me the issue- Thank you, K! You're the best :) I spent many-a-night drooling over the issue.


Karen's exhibition ends tomorrow- sorry for the short notice, my fellow New Yorkers. 

Here's making up for it- The Met Museum has a wonderful exhibit on, till Jan 8th 2012, of over 220 paintings from India, dated from 1100 to 1900. You can read more here.

I did visit the museum over 2 weeks ago to view the exhibit (and earlier even attended a Amjad Ali Khan concert for it's opening), but was quite distracted by the beautiful new Islamic Art wing instead. I promise to bring back photos of both soon.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Nina Paley's Avatars of Vishnu

Earlier this year, Nina Paley of the Sita Sings the Blues fame released a series of artwork, in her distinctive style, titled the Avatars of Vishnu. The artwork was originally designed for the Brooklyn Museum, in the traditional Javanese shadow puppet style.












Gnaana now offers the artwork as a calendar for 2012, with all the South Asian holidays marked.

Go here to check out the other avatars and to download them under Nina Paley's revolutionary free license- CC-BY-SA.
Go here to buy the calendar.
In 2013, I would just cut out the images and frame them for some Nina Paley's museum-worthy artwork on my wall.