SAI Photo Exhibit
On Display in the CGIS South Concourse from Nov. 5, 2014 – Jan. 31, 2015.
Open Mondays-Thursdays 7am – 9pm; Fridays 7am – 7pm
Capturing South Asia: Interview with Pablo Bartholomew
Coded Elegance, by Pablo Bartholomew, is a series of ethno-anthropological photographs of tribes and people of the hills and valleys of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur, taken from 1989 to 2000.
Coded Elegance constitutes a mere fragment of Bartholomew’s extensive visual anthropological documentation of the various tribes and people residing in the low Himalayan hills and valleys of Northeast India — a people whose lives are marked by tradition and transition. The series, an off shoot of Marked with Beauty, his 2000 exhibition of rich, color photographs of the many Naga tribes, is influenced by his own collection of portraits of the Darjeeling hill tribes by Johnston and Hoffman, and Irving Penn’s body of work in Papua New Guinea.
It explores his journey and interaction with tribes in Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Nagaland — diverse communities with myriad different languages and dialects — as well as the people inhabiting the valleys in that region. The preservation of their traditional cultures articulated through their dress, rituals, and rites of passage, forms the overarching subject of Coded Elegance.
With generous support from the Donald T. Regan Lecture Fund, the Arts Initiative at SAI brings experienced and emerging artists to Harvard whose work focus is on social issues related to South Asia.
