“Mumbai: the city that talks to me” - My Solo Photography Exhibition

All of you are coordially invited to
my Solo Show -

“mumbai: the city that talks to me”

a photographic tribute to

the city of dreams

by

Ritam Banerjee

on

Thursday, November 19, 2009.

6:30 – 9.00 PM.

(Photographs will be on display till

Wednesday, December 2, 2009.)

at

Gallery Art & Soul
1 Madhuli , Shiv Sagar Estate, Worli,
Mumbai 400 018.
Tel : 022 - 24965798 / 32536266
Email : galleryartnsoul@gmail.com
Web: www.galleryartnsoul.com

MUMBAI
The city that talks to me

This city talks to me in different ways. It always has. But for a while now, I had stopped listening. In the rattle of the taxi rides, the hum of phone calls and the silent chaos at shoots and coffee shops, I had closed my eyes to the Mumbai I knew so well… It took a paralyzing siege – an absurd gouging of history by terror – to force me to look again, harder.

I had a ringside view of 26/11. I watched the dome light up, heard the endless rounds of gunshots and met the living corpses in the hospitals. And yet in the line of duty, there’s no room for emotion. Numbed by practice, I stood unmoved by my own images that moved many in faraway continents.

But this is not about 26/11. It’s about Mumbai. It’s about hope. It’s about spirit. It’s about that December night when sixty odd hours of non-stop madness was finally put to an end and I looked out of my window to thank the stars, only to find a ‘Smiling Sky’ greeting me. A crescent-shaped moon with Jupiter and Venus twinkling on either side as if to say, it can only get better from here on.

These images are my way of saying thank you. My way of reconnecting with – touching, feeling, embracing – a city that has shared my life for a decade now. A doffing of my hat to the Mumbai that gives a man his spine and makes him a part of its thriving reality. An attempt to capture the city in abstraction, in fun, in hidden levity. A picking up of unfinished conversation, long overdue. Mumbai can laugh at itself. It can look unfamiliarly familiar even to a lens that sees it every single day. It can play peek-a-boo like a truant child.

Life, people, time, roads, sea, trains, bridges, buy, sell, sleep, wake, hush, laughter, run, stop… Mumbai rocks. Mumbai smiles. And so do I.