A Review of Ethereal Earth

Book: Ethereal Earth
Author: Rishipratim Guha Mustafi
Date: April 2024
Number of pages: 96
ISBN: 978-81‐967932-3-4

Review by Ajanta Paul

 

Ethereal Earth by Rishipratim Guha Mustafi is a feast for the eyes as he takes the viewer on a panoramic journey across various places in India and Bhutan. Artfully reproduced on glossy paper, the 76 photographs unfurl their narratives of reality, mystery, beauty and fantasy through an adroit blend of light, colour, form and texture. Captured and compiled by a professional photographer who consciously chose his artistic discipline over a regular job in the IT industry, this book is for photography enthusiasts and art connoisseurs alike.

Divided into nine sections - Kolkata, Madhya Pradesh, Bhutan, Darjeeling, Paradip, Kiriburu, Howrah, Jamshedpur and Daringbadi, this magnificent collection of landscape photographs is an opulent testimony to natural beauty in its many forms.

Interestingly, Nature dominates the depiction of urban scenes, too, lingering within the frames of city compositions as is the case with the Kolkata and Jamshedpur photographs. When these photographs are not celebrating a stark and striking chiaroscuro of the city they're serenading the cosmos in all its elemental splendour. Skies swirling with clouds, awash with delicate hues, at times gently luminous with a dawn mist or sunset haze unfold across the pages in a cornucopia of shades that sates the aesthetic palate.

The very word “photography” meaning “drawing with light” provides an insight into its process of creation. While painters use pigments to draw objects or abstractions, photographers use light to define their subjects. This practice of painting with light is exquisite in Ethereal Earth as the photographer plays with its effects in frame after frame. The quality, intensity and direction of light determine the visual aspect of the work, impacting its mood and mystique.

Like Alice Aedy, documentary filmmaker who believes her work “is driven by the idea that visual storytelling and images have the power to change the world”, Guha Mustafi’s camera is immersed in its truth telling tryst as it seeks to transform modes of perception which, for their part, can revolutionize the way we look at things or understand their inner dynamics.

In the best tradition of landscape photographs which capture sweeping vistas along with detailed close-ups, Guha Mustafi's lens is, for the most part, unerring in its estimation of scale, intuitively incorporating both expansive shots of the immense outdoors and minutely observed details of a humdrum human life. The photograph in the Bhutan section (p 49), for instance, presents a nebulous landscape in the distance where a clothesline with a couple of clothes pegs in the foreground adds that domestic detail which imparts an overall balance to the composition.

Each photograph speaks to the soul initiating a dialogue of discovery that attempts to understand the dreamscape in its mesmerizing aspects. Some of the photographs of this young lensman have the quality of paintings, the liquid colours flowing fluidly into each other as light suffuses the outlines of things. Those on pages 32, 37, 47 and 80, for instance, are mist-laden scenes where the outlines between land, sky and vegetation are blurred in an apotheosis of mysterious haziness. Most of the photographs in the Madhya Pradesh, Bhutan and Darjeeling sections are picture postcard perfect in the delicacy of their tints and neatness of composition. The frames on pages 32, 36, 44, 46, 47 and 80 may be regarded as representative examples of this kind of lyrical beauty. They are, at the same time, Impressionistic in their use of light and general diffusion of detail.

Lavish centre spreads like the photographs (on pages 18-19. 22-23. 42-43, 58-59, 84-85, 88-89, 92-93) demonstrate a centripetal energy, opening from the centre onto distant margins, exhibiting considerable spatial range within their aesthetic ambit, and presenting the near with the far in an ambitious embrace.

In photographs across sections a river frequently winds along like the proverbial twist in the tale, sometimes barely discernible, a whisper of white merging with the background; and at other times, an active agent of allurement touched with a brilliant indigo or the rosy blush of sunset. Similarly, river banks, skies and clouds constitute a lingering leitmotif of recognizable natural elements in the overall symphony of space and style.

There is something haunting about the imagery - a solitary boat cruising on blue waters in the Paradip section; a lone cowherd driving his bovine flock home in the dusk; an ebony silhouette of a bird etched against a slowly kindling dawn horizon in one of the Kolkata frames; and a lost and lonely boulder in the serene flow of the Narmada in the Madhya Pradesh section. Each of these figures instils in its own way, a sense of loneliness but not necessarily desolation in the contemporary experience.

As the photographer strives to uncover that elusive truth - that epiphany born of angle, depth and light, experimenting as he does with filter and aperture control, he sometimes delivers  brilliantly in capturing the essence of mood and moment. In such instances one is reminded of Alfred Stieglitz's words, "In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”

In several of the landscape photographs the focus, usually softly effulgent, is on serving a lateral slice of the topography under description. The sequence of the frames tells its own story, often with single and double pages providing variants on the same theme under different types of lighting. The same piece of landscape is sometimes seen from different angles of vision, the photographer's perspective negotiating new transactions of locatedness and identity. Such a resonantly repetitive technique seems to be a visual counterpart of literary postmodernism with its lush and overlapping modes of storytelling.

The vision that holds together this compelling and comprehensive photo-essay seems to emanate from a gentle wisdom which sees an interconnectedness between all things, and which engages with the essential haziness of matter, the clarity of truth being just an aspect of the epistemological reality.

Handsomely produced by Penprints, the present repository of rich and rewarding prints is a collector's item with its coherent context, concept and content. The minimal text enhances the lucidity of the frames without being, in any way, intrusive or redundant. The layout, typography, color, size, paper and binding of the book testify to a commitment to quality that is non  negotiable.

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Setu, July 2025