Allegory & Illusion

One of the first exhibitions of its kind in North America, 'Allegory and Illusion' offers an intimate survey of vintage images from the modern nations of India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Nepal. Together, they established a unique regional history of photo­graphy through both foreign and local practitioners.

For this seminal collaboration between the Rubin Museum of Art (New York} and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (New Delhi), the photographs have been drawn exclusively from the private collection of Mr. E. Alkazi, a figure of international repute associated with theatre direction in India and as a collector of fine art. As part of his historic: photography archive, these Images have been curated to explore the linked fields of portraiture, figuration, and Inter-visual communication.
The three lead essays, together with photographer biographies and techniques, present varied perspectives on photography's development of a unique vemac:ular culture. Ethnography, identity, integration, and assimilation are therefore some of the key notions that underlie practices of portraiture and domesticating space-reordering how an image may be perceived in our dig Ital present.

Some of the leading photographers and studios presented are Fellce Beato, Bourne & Shepherd, Johnston & Hoffmann, Gobind Ram & Codey Ram, Darogah Abbas All, Raja Deen Dayal and Shapur Bhedwar. The conditions under which some of their images were shot express the diverse relationship between political events and photographic practice. However, the curators resist a teleological narrative, taking Into account not only the role of the medium and the state of technology but significantly, photography's non-linear systems of exchange, circulation and collection.