View camera photography unveiled at Rohtas Gallery

A collection of photographs by Lukas Werth, featuring the socio-cultural lifestyle of two great countries, Pakistan and Germany, was unveiled here on Monday at the Rohtas Gallery. Through his lens, the German artist has presented a comparison of the two countries with the “East meets West” theme. The classic photography cache titled ‘Twilight’ has been produced by using the century-old technical gadget called ‘view camera’. The large size photographs showcasing cultural heritage and social-economic life of cities including Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Lahore, Munich, Berlin and others. Since December 2008, Lukas Werth has been teaching anthropology at LUMS. Having received his PhD in 1992 from the Free University of Berlin for an ethnography about the Vagri, a peripatetic group in South India. Deeply involved in photography both as an anthropological endeavor and as an art form.
He regards photography as an independent form of visual art capable of making statements relevant to the contemporary world. He combines this with his anthropological interests, that is, he explores an artistic vision inspired by anthropological perspectives. One main topic of this combination is the exploration of cultural contexts in Pakistan which he tries to present in a personal vision, leading away from common Western prejudices, and also appealing to a spectator familiar with the contexts depicted. His theoretical interests include meaning, self, ethics and aesthetics in Anthropological thought; different aspects of religion as such, Islam, including Sufism and fundamentalism, Hinduism, kinship, rituals, concepts of modernity and Western thought, and peripatetic societies. Areas of his ethnographic interests are South Asia, most notably Pakistan and India, Western contexts, as the development of Western visual arts and the place of photography in this context.
Talking to Pakistan Today, Lukas Werth, said he wanted to develop an expressive vision of his work on Sufism, a vision which should somehow reflect the beauty involved in this concept, the beauty over and above every flaw, every imperfection, every distortion or manipulation which might be found, and that he wanted to be able to communicate this to audiences familiar as well as foreign to the scenes shown.
“Secondly, in recent years, the Western perspective on the Islamic world has become more and more antagonistic. I use a consciously subjective perspective which amounts, or so I hope, to a personal vision of a tradition which evokes feelings of homeliness and beauty for those who are willing to see,” he added.
Lukas said the reality was interpreted in such a way that allowed the spectator, whether she or he was part of that tradition or not, to get a glimpse of all those details and associations which made people feel at home. Generally, photographic representations of South Asia tend to concentrate on the colourful and the exotic, socially or culturally exciting or disquieting: the bazaar, traders, temples, peasants, faqirs, castles, landscapes with palm trees, camels, bullet carts, cows in the countryside, slums, beggars, and all this in bright, “natural” colours.
“The pictures were taken all with analogue methods, in fact with an old-fashioned wooden view camera which is slow and cumbersome. I got my first camera of this sort here Pakistan many years ago. This way of taking pictures continues to enhance photographic vision, even if it takes about 30 minutes to expose an image. I also like to use not only modern, but also antique lenses for the special image quality they are able to produce”, the German artist maintained. Lukas said the prints which were available for Rs 26,000 each- were printed through laborious, old-fashioned photographic processes. He said most of them were so-called casein prints, while others were cyanotypes blue prints.
“The need for a big negative was the primary reason why all these processes went out of fashion and became finally obsolete,” the artist said. The exhibition will continue at the Rohtas Gallery (House No. 57-B, Street No. 26, F-6/2) until 30 November.