Beyond documentation:
The Photographs of
Jyoti Bhatt
Sandhya Bordewekar
This genuinely sensitive interest in folk, rural and tribal forms of public visual expression can be
traced not only to the Santiniketan influence brought in by Jyotibhai’s teachers at the Faculty of Fine
Arts, Baroda, such as Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, but also to his school, Dakshinamurti
in Bhavnagar, an ‘unorthodox’ institution for education based and run on Tagorean and Gandhian ideals.
But, of course, Jyotibhai went much beyond that as well. In addition to the rural/tribal, popular urban culture interested him a great deal, especially its wacky humour that was often not deliberate and sophisticated but ingénue, naïve. The urban street opened up vistas of street imagery inspired by the colourful wayside larris (handcarts) selling tea and fast food, ritualistic and secular wall decorations, political and social slogans, the amusing results of incorrectly slashed words and sentences that horribly distort the original meaning, the lovingly decorated rickshaws and trucks with their collection
of pithy sayings: ‘Boori nazarwale tera muh kala’ and the politically correct, jingoistic “Diwali mein Ali aur Ramzan mein Ram – Hum sab ek hai’. How does one photograph these and contextualise them so that they are not just reduced to ‘funny
images that make you smile’ (and ideal for uploading on Facebook!)? That is where Jyotibhai’s ability, skill and talent as a contemporary artist with a sharp visual intelligence and a keen understanding of the use and misuse of verbal language makes all the difference – he adroitly uses subversion to create his own particular brand of visual language spanning a bridge between traditional and modernist idioms, especially in his prints, and sometimes in his photographs. Jyotibhai’s move to photography was more in the nature of using the camera in place of the etching needle, rather than the exploration
of a new medium. In a strange way, the three creative interests in Jyotibhai’s life – painting, printmaking and photography— appear ‘mutually influenced’. “My graphic prints are often ‘spotted’ like photographs, hand-coloured and resemble paintings.