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Beauty sans glam
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K. Venkatesh focuses on some exotic traditional jewellery without adding an artificial patina of glamour
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ENDURING TRADITION K. Venkatesh's black-and-white pictures present jewellery as carriers of tradition
Call it the magic of free association. It was all those pierced navels in a happening pub in Bangalore that set photographer K. Venkatesh thinking about the heavy paambadams hanging from the elongated earlobes of elderly women in Tirunelveli.
He set off with his camera looking for these exotic ear ornaments that have been worn by some communities in rural Tamil Nadu for centuries. The result was a series of 30-odd photographers. "Designed in the shape of snake hoods, the ear ornaments weigh more than 50 gm each," says Venkatesh. "While jewellery is usually the stuff of glamour photography, I wanted to look at them differently." In fact, most pictures are in black and white and are close shots of these traditional ear ornaments with the furrowed faces of aged women in the background. Beautiful, but in a manner starkly different from the kind we see in the designer jewellery ads.
Venkatesh then decided to travel in a different direction in search of yet another variety of exotic traditional jewellery — those worn by the Lambanis in the districts bordering Maharashtra and Andhra. He was fascinated by not just the intricateness of the ornaments they wear in their hair, nose, ears, hands and feet, but by how they use the most unlikely of objects to make jewellery — including hairpins, safety pins and old coins. One of the pictures shows a Lambani woman in a ghungat which has a series of old two-paisa coins stitched along the borders.
Venkatesh has put together the pictures he took in the show Ornate Jewellery — Treasure Trove.
It is on at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishat from August 16 to 20 between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.
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