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The Beauty of India
2012-04-27 09:33
Four years ago, the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco mounted a major exhibition of the work of photographer Suzanne Held. She has spent the last thirty years as a special correspondent, travelling the world and producing extraordinary and beautiful photographic collections of some of the most exotic places on earth. And now, visitors to Nice's Asiatic Arts Museum have the chance to share her vision of India in a new exhibition which runs till May.
Ever the adventurer, Held was the first journalist to cross the 5000m-high Tibetan plateaux into Nepal when the border was first opened, and with the aid of the army she covered the discovery of the great Lost City archaeological site in Columbia, the first European to do so.
She has published some thirty pictorial albums, including volumes on Vietnam, China, India, Nepal, Myanmar, Angkor, Thailand, Java, Bali, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, Sri Lanka, Rajasthan and Japan, as well as the books 'Sur les routes de la soie' (On the Silk Route) and 'Himalaya - Monastères et fêtes bouddhiques' (Buddhist Monasteries and Festivals of the Himalayas) published by Gallimard.
An expert on Asia, Suzanne Held has visited India over forty times and travelled its length and breadth, and the current exhibition in Nice, which runs till May 2010, is the product of those journeys. Revealed in all its squalor and splendour, her pictures show the vibrancy of a culture which had clearly captivated her - one in which the sacred and profane mingle in streets and landscapes filled with colour and rhythm.
Fom the temple of the Sun at Korarak and camel racing across the lunar landscape of Pushkar in Rajisthan, from the floating dwellings of Kashmir to the lofty Taj Mahal, Held's pictures enable the visitor to this exhibition to imagine, for a transient moment, that they have been transported by magic carpet to the land of the lotus itself.