The Dazzling Black-and-White Photographs of India’s Premier Darkroom Artist

In the varied archive of O. P. (Om Prakash) Sharma, who has been practicing and teaching photography in India since the 1950s, human forms are inserted into labyrinths of geometric patterns, repeated in multiple postures across the photographic frame, and cast into eerie inversions of light and dark. In The Open Door (1968), a man leans against an unseen wall to speak more intimately with a quizzical child, making a motion of explanation with his right hand as his legs lean long across the framing rectangle. Transformed through Sharma’s methodical darkroom work, the conversing figures are enclosed in a maze of repetitive bands, an effect produced by creating a photogram and turning it into a black-and-white negative on high-contrast film.

Sharma’s images are painstakingly produced, often with multiple layers of photograms, solarization, combined prints, or reflections that create dreamlike spaces. Even if these techniques sound impenetrably complicated and laborious, they are essential components of the Pictorialist’s tool kit. And, as is also often the case with Pictorialists, Sharma’s practice is difficult to pin down: it is forged out of many different themes, techniques, and visual vocabularies. He is as much a prominent portraitist as he is a darkroom alchemist, testing the limits of experimental processes such as multiple printings, photograms, and collage, while, occasionally, developing his own techniques, including a meticulous method for multiple solarization. “Pictorial photography is the mother of all branches of photography,” Sharma noted in a 2020 interview, declaring that its biggest contributors are amateurs “who spend their time, money, energy and their life to discover new things.”

By the mid-twentieth century, Pictorialism was considered passé in the United States and relegated to the terrain of the amateur. But South Asian practitioners such as J. N. Unwalla, A. L. Syed, and Sharma in India, along with Lionel Wendt in Sri Lanka, kept the style alive. That these bodies of work have only recently been revived in writings and histories of photography around the world speaks to the enduring power of the U.S. model for so-called photographic progression: even within India, as camerawork has gone through the global motions of modernism, photojournalism, and documentary, the country’s vast and prolific network of Pictorialists has remained under-addressed in the prevalent literature.

Despite this near erasure of many successful practitioners in India, Sharma has been one of the country’s most enthusiastic proponents of the medium of photography. It was Sharma who wrote in the late 1980s to the Photographic Society of America and the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain requesting that August 19 be recognized as World Photography Day to mark the anniversary of the French government purchasing the patent for the daguerreotype in 1839. The first World Photography Day was celebrated in 1991, a likely result of Sharma’s personal efforts. Sharma, who was born in 1937, in Agra, moved to New Delhi in 1958, where he has been teaching photography ever since: at the Modern School from 1958 to 2000 and also, since 1980, heading the photography department at Triveni Kala Sangam, a prominent visual and performing arts institution. Sharma’s publications range from handy primers on the technical aspects of the camera to expositions on the oeuvres of Unwalla and Syed, his stylistic predecessors. In his many decades as an educator, Sharma will have taught hundreds, if not thousands, of students the intricacies of darkroom experimentation. Across his lifetime, his work has been shown in close to forty solo exhibitions, mostly in galleries and photographic societies in India as well as in the United States, Pakistan, and Norway.

How are we to locate a practice as expansive as this?

Sharma’s work does not speak of South Asia as an empty photographic scene reliant on Europe and the United States for cues. It presents us with an active cosmopolitan global system of photography to which postcolonial photographers contributed localized visual languages, literature, and pedagogy. The range of Sharma’s influences—from the Armenian Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh to the Soviet Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, from Man Ray to Unwalla and Syed—is a testament to the cultural interconnectedness of this world. It does not pander to the primacy of New York as a photographic ground zero. To the contrary, it speaks to the preservation of darkroom experimentation in alternative geographies, where photographers such as Sharma have maintained the memory of photography as a careful, laborious, and tactile act of creation.

This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 243, “Delhi: Looking Out/Looking In,” under the title “Light Work.”