THE WONDERFUL AND EYE CATCHING WORK OF
PHOTOGRAPHER NILANGANA BANERJEE
It is such a pleasure to look at Nilangana
Banerjee’s photographs. She is a master photographer who lives and works in Los
Angeles and was born and raised in Mumbai, India. Her images are all well
thought out and the frames are full of tidbits of information that help define
the characters or the story that is the subject of the photograph.
Nilangana has a Master’s degree in fine Arts
and a masters in Commercial Photography -one of them is from the prestigious
art educational institution in India, Light & Life Academy (LLA), and the
other is from the legendary New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, California.
She has been around photography since she was a little girl in Mumbai, as her
father was an engineer but also had a passion for photography, which is what
initially influenced her even more. After she got her own camera, however,
there was no stopping for her and she dove in headfirst and studied all things
in photography.
Her interesting and important work has been
exhibited in several global exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Portland.
She has earned the praise of critics and photography enthusiasts around the
world. She has several photography series currently and one of them deals with
the complexity of the self and its search for the ideal self. The series, Selves, is a compelling way to tell the
story of a conflict between the selves, the protagonist and the self, he or she
is searching for, the ideal self. She quotes Tolstoy to make a point: “If you
look for perfection, you will never be content.” It’s a quote that aptly fits
the conflict of the Selves and the
images that Nilangana has so carefully chosen to represent them.
Her very dramatic and so thoroughly planned
out concept reminds the viewer of how movie directors must work. The execution
is flawless because of her pre-visualization and time consuming production
design, art direction and composing the players (subjects). Film directors do
the same thing only on a larger scale in total but it’s the same when you think
of it scene by scene.
Nilangana’s other current series, The Lullaby, again demonstrates her
mastery of storytelling through still photography. Her camera catches each
potentially terror-filled nursery rhyme at just the right time to let us know
that either something deadly is about to happen or that it just did. There is
darkness and demise in the faces of many of her Lullaby rhymes. The knife in one and the bloodstained carpet in
another, definitely prove her project about the children’s tales: They have the
ability to impart violent interpretations and thus may tend to influence one’s
personality in a very negative manner.
Post a Comment