The photographs in A.P. Matthew’s exhibition, Memories of India & An Indian from India (Seagull Arts & Media Resource Centre, till August 12), can be classified under two distinct categories of representation. The first brings together a collection of black-and-white images of the “light, gestures, smells and sounds” of a country where Matthew lived from adolescence till early adulthood. The second set of pictures explores her responses to her life in America. The two categories differ not just in content, but in the quality of the images as well. Yet, there is an underlying, binding theme. In each, the eye behind the lens is that of an outsider, one who finds herself “between two different cultures”.

The role of the memory is of critical importance to Matthew’s photographs taken in India. A skilled lensman, she uses a camera that lends to the images a cloudy, distilled tone. Many of her photographs have thus acquired a memory-like quality. She also sometimes uses strong light, giving the images a surreal sharpness. The moments that Matthew’s camera preserves are, in a way, timeless — a man crossing the ruins of a temple, the silhouetted figure of a woman sifting rice, two cows standing in a circle of light, their heads touching lightly, a woman washing her feet by the river at sunrise.

There are also images of mysterious solitude and of tenderness. Take, for instance, the long-shot of a truck with a solitary figure sitting on its roof (picture, left). The road lies by the side of a flat plain, while above, in the clear sky, a disc-like sun shines. There is a beauty in this picture that is at once mystical and melancholic. Another enchanting photograph is that of a man bathing an elephant (picture, right). This shot, taken from close, shows the beast lying in shallow water. The spiral of its trunk is echoed in the swirling currents in the water and in the twist of the attendant’s hand. This image is paired with that of a man pouring a bucket of water over another. Matthew’s India is full of moments like these, images that convey her love and longing for a land to which she does not belong any more.

In the photographs in “An Indian from India”, Matthew plays on the themes of ‘otherness’ and ‘stereotyping’ in an alien land by juxtaposing self-portraits with images of 19th-century American Indians. But the politics in her portraits is different from that of the original. What is significant about these images is Matthew’s clever reversal of the asymmetry in the power relationship between the photographer and the subject. The American Indians had no agency in the portraits that feature them. But Matthew takes control of the production of her images, dressing up to mimic the gestures of an ancient people, to show that this time the dynamics of the relationship between the camera and its subject have changed.