WILLIAM DALRYMPLE : THE HISTORIAN'S EYE: Pundole's Mumbai Exhibition

Pundole's  is pleased to announce renowned author and historian William Dalrymple’s return to the lens in a stunning exhibition of black-and-white photographs, chronicling people and places, and the inter-relationships among them, in the Historian’s Eye.

The Historian’s Eye presents a photographic record of William Dalrymple’s travels across the country over the last two years while researching his latest book titled The Anarchy, published by Bloomsbury in September 2019. It features a unique set of images of the places where art and history were being made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and includes a small selection of photographs from modern-day Pakistan.

William Dalrymple is well-known and recognized for his writing, but photography was his first love, the artistic outlet of his youth. The purchase of a Samsung Edge camera phone in recent years led to his re-discovery of the medium. Dalrymple’s approach to photography – facilitated here by the mobility and immediacy of a camera phone – is intuitive and instinctive, while his aesthetic reflects the sensibility of polished, economical prose, resulting in stark, high-contrast images pared down to their essence.

Photographs are intrinsically bound to place and time, but Dalrymple’s images create a wrinkle in time that highlight an intermingling of the monumental past and fleeting present. Each photograph reveals a narrative tension within itself, between stillness and movement, history and reality. A boy skips down the passage, a cyclist turns at the gate, a hawk circles the dome: the past by turn is present, unveiled, subverted and transformed in the contemporary moment through the historian’s lens.