The new exhibition at Tasveer presents work of Swapan Nayak (October 9 to 25), a photojournalist from Kolkata. The images here, being his personal effort of empathy and subtle aesthetics, independent of media paradigms, offer insight into rarely seen regions of reality. Over the past few years he shot ordinary people on the north-eastern fringes of the country displaced by either natural calamities or ethnic violence. His images of "Refugees in their own land" hardly depict their new landscapes. Focussing on single figures and small groups against and within the non-specific, make-shift immediacy of their modest domestic surroundings, the artist indeed brings out a feel of their state as "Nowhere people" - like suggested by the title of the second series.

His portraits do capture individual features and expressions of suffering, despair and coping during a contact that mediates the subjects' awareness of their state in front of the camera and the photographer's own sensitivity to how the same is revealed spontaneously by the people and the places. There is compassion and warmth in the takes as well as respectful distance. This, together with the self-evident character of the surroundings which links to and reflects the fate of the people, makes these photographs capture the condition as such rather than individual stories. This is achieved all the stronger that the shots are subdued under a soft gravity, somewhat hazy and shadowy in their black and white monochrome, and above all, imbibe Nayak's attuning.

His composing method, too, is less of a conscious choice and more a sensibility that has absorbed and internalised classic ways till those turned unassumingly his own. Now they let him both finely but inconspicuously harmonise the sights and stimulate their inherent traits to gently enhance the existential predicament. Quiet authenticity prevails in the faces that speak sometimes of sudden terror, more so of long-endured pain, uncertainty and static hopelessness, but also of quietly continued effort in situations of tragedy and in daily business. Very touching are the prints that reverberate of joy within the sadness, as someone plays music or a child holds a bird. Among the best are the images of little spirited boys wearing cheeky-loud sunglasses.
Elsewhere fragile, leaning bamboo structures and mat walls echo the human position. The artist emphasises its starkness by juxtaposing silhouettes of refugees to the expanses of stones or of a patchwork quilt screen. He captures inner turbulence, transience and vulnerability against the frothing water currents or the varied parallels of fallen bicycles and rows of drying yarn. The mild grain of the dark-milky mist in some prints evokes a sense of being lost. The dominant empathic lyricism informs also the shots without people whose presence can be intuited in the coarse, empty chairs in an ineffective shelter exposed to the weather, its helpless, bent poles which don't support a roof any more appearing to tentatively reach to one another.

The only drawback in this excellent show may be the frequent unnecessarily literal titles.