#kenhermann

EXCELLENT EXOTICA

Is India becoming fashionable once again?  Fashionistas are drinking turmeric milk and wearing mango-print dresses.  And there are two new prominent photo essays on Indian street fashion.  One, in the Times, by Brooklyn photographer Mark Hartman, called Capturing the Colorful Style of Punjab, India, focuses on residents of that northern state.  Another, in National Geographic, by Danish photographer Ken Hermann, called Flower Men, focuses on Kolkata flower vendors.

Hartman’s photos are exactly what the title promises: shots of women in colorfully mismatched salwars, duppattas, bangles, and bindis, and men in candy-hued turbans, cartoon mustaches, and aviator glasses.  The shots are too loosely composed for my taste.  Subjects are most often captured unknowingly, staring benignly into the middle distance, sweetened in honey-colored sunlight.  The shots betray a naive cultural fascination, as if taken during a middle American couple’s first holiday on the subcontinent.  These photographs have less to do with fashion than anthropology.  One could find more bracing Indian style on a street corner in Jackson Heights.

Hermann’s photos are precisely the inverse: strident, classically-composed portraits of men at work.  He poses the flower vendors formally, on a walkway along the Hugli River, in strong midday sunlight that bleaches the background and quiets the lush, riotous tones of their skin, fabric and flowers.  Each man stands straight, at the center of the frame, and looks directly into the camera,  handsome, alert, and quietly proud.  A caption below notes his name and the varieties of flowers he sells.

Most remarkably, Hermann’s photos go beyond portraiture to capture something of the lunatic grace and excess of India, which only someone who’s spent significant time there understands.  The basket of long, crimpled ashoka leaves Angad Ray balances on his head makes an Ascot-worthy hat, and his lungi is folded around his knees with the studied asymmetries of a Comme des Garcons skirt.  Kulwinder carries thick garlands of marigolds over each shoulder that fan out around him like a medieval priest’s cloak.  These photographs trade in exoticism, for sure, but it’s an artful one.