A Reflective Oeuvre

A Reflective Oeuvre presents rare reproductions from the City Palace Museum, Jaipur, showcasing Maharaja Sawai Ram Singh II’s pioneering role as India’s first known photographer-king. The collection, spanning the 1860s and ‘70s, includes portraiture, urban documentation, and landscape imagery, highlighting the Maharaja’s skill and self-reflective approach to photography. His work as a copyist, emulating Western art and objects, reflects his experimentation with photography as both reportage and allegory. Through his adept replication of art and images, Sawai Ram Singh creates a visual autobiography, balancing private and public statements, inviting viewers to reconsider early photography in Jaipur as a unique intersection of regionalism, colonialism, and modernity.

The exhibition also featured re-composed ‘vintage’ works by Nandan Ghiya, a Jaipur-based contemporary artist whose pieces merge vectorized surfaces, vintage photographs, and spectral designs. Ghiya’s work challenges historical narratives while engaging with regional identity, blending new iconographies with digital culture. His imagery, marked by rupture and transformation, meditates on the in-between state of memory, location, and history, offering a complex visual dialogue that resonates across time and space. Together, the works of Sawai Ram Singh II and Nandan Ghiya explore the evolving relationship between past and present, colonial and regional, personal and public in the realm of image-making.