LAHORE: Twenty eight photographs, all in colour, hang on the walls of the Nairang Gallery, revealing the beauty of arid, eroded, Baluchistan. Mariam Mehmood’s photo exhibition was more than the usual art exhibition. It was by an amateur photographer’s first exhibition about a place that not many have seen.
Ormara, which is an old coastal town on the Makran Coast, is a four hour drive from Karachi and falls between Karachi and Gwadar. “I saw many things as we drove to Ormara – the Hingol National Park too. So I just took my camera out and took photos of these places, and I never knew that I would actually be having an exhibition for this.”
Mariam is originally from Lahore, but lives and works in New York, for an NGO called Common Humanity. Some of her projects have been associated with exhibiting Iraqi refugee artists, who are in exile in Damascus. “It is to help them make a living through their art and also raise the issue of their displacement,” says Mariam. In this project, she has also written short stories which are also illustrated by artists. These will be available for sale at the exhibition.
“My friends told me to exhibit my photos that I had taken during my trip to Ormara, and I did,” she explains how she put up her very first exhibition. But all proceeds go to the flood victims.
Mariam describes the place as ‘simply beautiful’. “I saw naturally eroded, dry hills, something very different, I also understood that the place was extraordinary that not many people knew about it and not many people went there.
But my friend goes there regularly so I ended up going with him, and I found it to be wonderful.” Mehmood says she is not a photographer by training, in fact she does not even own a proper camera. “I just have a point and shoot, but my real motivation lies in the place itself.”
The exhibition which was titled ‘Hidden Treasure of Pakistan: Ormara, Baluchistan”, introduced the town first in a poster, so that the audience knew where the place was and what it was about. Mariam’s pictures are centred on scenic beauty.
Sunsets staining the sky into a bright orange hue, streaked with grey clouds, and the sun melting behind them slowly, is only one example of the dusk that she has attempted to capture. In yet another, there is the sun itself, silhouetting the craggy hilltops in the foreground and background, one of its rays being caught by the camera.For a photographer, one of the best sceneries to preserve on film at dusk time would be the sun setting with its glittering reflection in the sea. The Makran beaches are a more sedate version of Karachi’s polluted and rougher ones. The calm waters of the Arabian Sea here show the sun, in its semi circle position of setting, orange and purple in the sky and the waters multiplying the picturesque scenery.
But Mariam’s fascination with sunsets does not limit her photographs to one theme or subject. Her intrigue in simply showing the beach, as a solid blue grey element of nature’s masterpieces, in expressing the waves as the wonderful colour contrast to the sky, (white surf crashing around with a steel grey sky behind), shows her eye for good frames and how she has the ability to bring out colour in a monotone seascape. The arid topography of Baluchistan is also well known for its hills and mountain ranges. Jagged, eroded ranges, showing layer after layer of pre historic land piled up to make a hill, is another over powering landscape she has managed to show her audience.
One particular hill resembles Mount Rushmore, and one may almost see the faces of the four American presidents popping out of the hills suddenly. One of the most haunting photos by Mariam is the repeatedly fading silhouette of some hills near the bay of Ormara. These are shaped like plateaus, and seem to fade away in the distance. The haunting effect of a mist like atmosphere, a lifeless sea, and hills which are fading away in the mist is almost eerie and even morbid seeming to symbolize death itself.
