Capturing a lands’ visage

There is nothing like the beauty of a real life moment being captured in that one split of a second and then mounted onto a wall for all to see. Moreover, there is nothing equal to an incredibly talented artist capturing that moment on his own. Abbrar Cheema’s photographs, which are displayed at the Ejaz Art Gallery, are brilliant by any standards. His work is reminiscent of the finest of realist paintings, especially because of the play of light in each picture. This is something in fact that must be noted.
Because Cheema did his Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Central Punjab, he is basically a painter and a painter has a completely different concept of light falling into the frame he is looking into. Any picture, whether it is a painting or a photograph is dependant on light but it is the intensity of this light that changes the look of the scene. “A painter’s job is to study the light,” says Cheema, who is happy to exhibit his work and receive such applause as he has. “Once this light, its angle and degree is determined, the rest is just composition.” Cheema makes it sound so easy, but one look at his beautiful pictures and one cannot believe how anyone could have discovered these moments and caught them on camera.
Even though he is user of a first-rate Nikon 3700, Cheema proves that the camera is not everything. In fact, the camera is only a tool. “It is all up to the person who has made the composition. As a painter, I know that composition besides light matters a lot. You can say that the subject matters too but that is more than obvious. A picture without a subject is useless, but once the subject is determined, the photographer must understand that composing the picture – that means framing the scene or the subject is extremely important for good results. The rest of the stuff happens with practice.”
The theme of Cheema’s exhibition is based on Pakistan, its true face. True to its title, ‘The Real Visage of My Land”, is a take on the beauty of Pakistan. “Unfortunately, I haven’t travelled to every nook and cranny of the country,” says Cheema, who dotes on his land. “But what I have seen is enough to tell me that everything is beautiful. We are so rich in natural and historical diversity I don’t understand how we can complain about this country’s beauty. We have rivers, seas, deserts, plains, greenery, aridity and everything is spell-binding. I have loved to photograph these places that I have been to and show that we are not a country where terrorists reside. This in fact is Pakistan’s real face,” the ace photographer says.
Meanwhile, one specific style that Cheema has developed is clicking while using an Infra Red filter. This style may not be that unique globally but Cheema says he is the only Pakistani to use this filter. The IR filter which is an expensive device, a 500mm lens will use a filter costing around Rs 50,000, works in such a way that it blocks out all Red Green Blue light and therefore all colours. This means that result of the photograph will be like it used to be back in the old days. The result will reveal everything in white and black with only one dominant red colour in the rest of the picture. A building near water will show the building to be white with black in the shadows, while the water will be red instead of blue.
Using this effect, Cheema has dared to make some changes using editing software, but only to change the colour and bring a kind of stylistic twist to his pictures. Otherwise he says he does not like editing his pictures. “Editing removes the reality from the photos in my opinion,” he says. “This is the reason I have enlarged my pictures and mounted them on the wall so that people can see whether I have done any editing or not. This real face of Pakistan lies in front of them without any false additions or manipulations,” he says.