Jean Gauthier, a 30-year-old teacher from Brussels, Belgium, walks around the OED Gallery at Mattancherry, near Kochi, with wide eyes. “This is a most unusual exhibition,” he says.
Indeed, it was. French photographer Louimari Maudet’s 14-day exhibition, Ca Vous Regarde (What Are You Looking At) in Kerala last month was about decayed, torn and mutilated posters, which can be seen all over India. “These are things we see, but ignore,” says Gauthier. His friend, Kim Mertens, a translator, says, “On the road, these posters seem ugly. Here they look transformed and now are things beauty.”
Many of them were ripped off, so you can only see an eye or a nose. Some posters have been placed on top of another. Not surprisingly, there were many from cinema. In one, there was the left eye of Amitabh Bachchan and, in another, the face of Kamal Haasan, from the Tamil film Virumandi, with unblinking eyes and a black moustache. The white sandalpaste on his forehead had turned brown and so had the black hair.
“These posters suffer from the effects of the rain, wind, sun, human intervention, insects, dust, and smoke from small fires,” says Maudet. “They are pasted everywhere—not only on walls, but also on lamp-posts, doors, fences and abandoned old cars.”
As many as 26 posters were displayed, although he took more than 4,000 photos. “These digital images have been transferred to canvas through a pigment print process,” he says. “Their hidden beauty is revealed in this way.”
Like most passions in life, Maudet stumbled on it by accident. One day in 2009, he was photographing a watchmaker in Chennai. Right next to the shop, he noticed an old poster on a wall. “The poster seemed to be looking at me,” he says. “I finally took a picture.” The same day when he was walking around, he suddenly noticed that many posters had the same powerful look. “I began taking pictures,” he says. “Soon, I became obsessed about it.” So far, he has taken photographs in places like Srinagar, Kanyakumari, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Thiruvananthapuram, Madurai, Puducherry, Mysuru and Hyderabad. He has visited 60 cities.
Maudet follows a particular method of work. “When I am in a city, I select a location and walk down the street,” he says. “Then I come back from the opposite side, all the time looking for old posters. Thereafter, I go down parallel and perpendicular roads. I end up walking about 25 km. But, at the end, I would have selected the posters I want to click.”
Asked whether ordinary people notice these posters, he replies in the negative. “The impact of the posters diminishes over time,” he says. “But when people see me taking pictures, they ask what I am doing. My answer makes them have a re-look at the posters, and then we will end up in an extraordinary conversation.”
One day in Chennai, while he was shooting a poster, three men came with new ones with a pot of glue. They were going to paste them over the old ones. “I told them, please don’t destroy these beautiful posters which I want to photograph,” he says. “They were kind enough to give me the time. But, later, they came and did their job.”
These posters are also a metaphor for our life. “We win fame, awards and honours,” says Maudet, “but later we suffer from decay and ultimately, death. I often ask myself: ‘What has happened to the person in the poster? Is he still alive? What did he become? What would he want to tell us if we met him today?’ These posters are short-lived, just like our life on earth.”