State of the Art

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Posts tagged with Goa

Remembering Prabuddha Dasgupta

August 15, 2012

Josheen Oberoi on the artist and photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta

New York: Prabuddha Dasgupta passed away on August 12, 2012 of natural causes. He was in his late 50s. A beloved photographer in India, he was internationally renowned for his commissioned fashion photography, but had, in fact, straddled the worlds of fashion and fine art photography for decades, one of the few to have done so with his level of acclaim.

Prabuddha Dasgupta
Francis and Bobby D’Souza in their Bedroom, Parra, Goa, 2006
Archival digital print on paper, 18.5 x 27 inches
Image courtesy Saffronart

Prabuddha Dasgupta was a self-taught photographer and first hit Indian national consciousness with the publication of his book Women in 1996, featuring portraits and nudes of Indian women. This publication came decades after he was already well established and revered as a photographer in the fashion and advertising industries. More recently, he published Edge of Faith (2009), comprising seventy nine intimate portraits of the Catholic community in Goa.

I had the pleasure of working with Prabuddha at his first personal showing in New York in 2007, for his body of work Longing. This series was also written about in the Paris Review. The show was a narrative of memories and experiences, with the artist allowing us a glimpse of intimate fragments of his life and experiences. These images, like most of his recognized work, were monochromatic; his mastery over the nuances of black and white being unparalleled.

Prabuddha Dasgupta
Untitled, 2005
Print on paper, 14.0 x 20.5 inches
Image courtesy Saffronart

What I took away most from my experience working with him, beyond his obvious artistic genius, was his tremendous humility. He had a degree of graciousness that is rare to encounter, in both his professional and personal interactions, and he will be sorely missed.

You can read more about him in the personal recollections of his colleague Pablo Bartholomew here. A couple of the many obituaries published over the last few days can also be read here and here.

NIVIM Goa: Let us start from the beginning…

May 24, 2012

The Saffronart Team goes back to when it all began…

New York: The design concept of Nivim Goa is to allow the user to reconnect with nature (reason to come to Goa) and to preserve the beauty of the site and its surroundings (hence preserving the reason to be in Goa).

Site photos before construction

The luxury country house achieves these goals by creating a home that is built around the site’s natural topography with emphasis on local climate, materials and building typology. The house’s architecture takes advantage of the site’s slope, existing trees, views and orientation.

One of the first site meetings before any construction activity

Before construction, the site had 14 fully mature trees. The design of the house incorporates these trees that include two jackfruit trees, one mango tree, two tamarind trees and one telful tree. Two trees in particular are located bang at the center of the site and look like they have been there for 100’s of years. One of them rises up almost 15 meters, or 5 stories.

Anjali says, “These trees have been here way longer than we have, we could not even conceive of removing them…they are instead now an integral part of the house design and lend it a special character that is hard to replicate.” She adds, “The new owners of the house can even consider building a treehouse or a machan to further enjoy these large trees based on their specific requirements…” The new landscape design of the house adds other native fruiting and flowering plants to the site including chikoo, kokum, champa, etc.

For more about the design concept and inspirations, read Anjali’s newyork goa diaries!

* Please note that NIVIM Goa is currently under-construction and the images on this blog show the work-in-progress and not final finished product.