Kalpana Reddy graduated in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda in 1983. She worked as an artist in the area of photography well before photography was recognized as a medium of art in India. Though she exhibited rarely, she had a continuous body of work from the 80’s to the present; from the era of film to digital.

The current show showcases her most recent, digital work which Kalpana was working on when she passed away suddenly last year.

All her photographs were taken outdoors, in natural light, and composed primarily on the camera’s view-finder itself. They are all photographs of nature and the natural world, visual testimonies, in other words, to the endless, timeless play of its elements: of sunlight on leaves, of wind on bark, of water and wind on sand and rock.

Using extreme close-ups, dramatic cuts, un-foreseen camera angles and surprising lighting decisions, and by radically de-contextualizing her subject matter, Kalpana’s photographs serve to de-familiarize and make strange the ordinary and the everyday.

The result is a series of images that undermine our visual smugness and habitual modes of seeing.