An exhibition of black and whites can whet your appetite. When the book is a quaint little hand-held wonder, you turn the pages in inquisitive excitement wanting to gulp every grain of grey and the limpid liquid flow of monochromatic magic.
The Writer’s Eye is a compilation of black and white images Dalrymple took during treks through Ladakh, visits to Yazd and Pasargardae and the deserts of western Iran, a journey along the Ganges and the marshes and causeways of coastal Northumbria and the desert fringes of Idaho, with his humble mobile phone.
In an interview to BBC, Dalrymple states that as a teenager, he spent a lot of time leafing through photographic books and particularly admired the bleak and grainy war photography of Don McCullin and the landscape work of Fay Godwin. He also states that his real hero was Bill Brandt, whose darkly brooding images were marked by a stark chiaroscuro, a strongly geometrical sense of composition, a whiff of the surreal and a taste for the uncanny and unsettling. The book gives us a taste of the silent stones of history to the beauty of animals and birds—the best being a lone dog held against a landscape of lush loneliness spelling the signature of soliloquy as the waters surrounded him. Symmetry, simplicity and classicism weave through passages in time and space.
Dalrymple has the eye of an epicurean. He has the intuitive understanding of anticipating extraordinary continuities and finding a universe within the islands of incongruous vistas.His writer’s eye seeks out moody moorings within the meandering of light, and he seeks to connect vistas of solitude with the quest for solace. His images of the Bamiyan are a subtle statement on the fragile fabric of history in the face of terrorism.
Yazd is signified by a pair of veiled women who look into the beyond. The image dispels any doubts about Dalrymple being a novice—his eye is discerning and he has a distinct understanding of apertures of timing. When he captures the tomb of Cyrus the Great in Iran, his frame of the soil and sky that creates a choreography is what entices.
In the image of Madhi Masjid at Mehrauli in Delhi, he gives us vignettes of arching tectonics. Then there is one image that dances with delight and gaiety—that of the flocks of fowl and goats and children.
Dalrymple’s role model Brandt once said: “When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and the right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.”
In the case of Dalrymple, the gods decided to create an alchemy of the confluence of all these laced with light. The only disappointment is the deliberate omission of the names of places with dates—(by the curator)—after all what is a photograph without dates? New age voyeurism?