Street life: Lahore’s fading splendour showcased

Photos show how city’s cultural heritage is being lost.

LAHORE: A bittersweet portrait of this city, showcasing its hidden architectural beauty as well as its grotesque civic issues, runs at the Alhamra Arts Council till January 22.

Photographer Qasim Naeem said his intention with the ‘Lahore Tilak’ exhibition was to highlight places that are not normally included in discussions of the city’s architectural or cultural marvels.

“Many places and subjects that are so close to our true culture get ignored,” Naeem said. “Haveli Nonehaal, for example, holds such enchanting beauty that one cannot get enough of it.

Unfortunately it is also used a dump where people throw garbage. I wanted to highlight such areas of Lahore that we know exist but don’t know where and how.”

Many of the city’s monuments are rapidly deteriorating and Naeem’s pictures capture the fading art of Lahore, whether that be in railway platforms, old mosques, or the streets of the Walled City.

They also capture the people who live and work near these places.

Arif Khan, professor at Punjab University, said he was impressed with the pictures. “Work that motivates you or inspires you to do something is what I consider a successful exhibition and the work of this young artist does that,” he said. “Every picture has its positives and negatives and both hold beauty.

They show us parts of our city that are slowly fading from attention and our lives.”

Some visitors to the exhibition did not appreciate the HDR imaging of some photographs. “I would have appreciated his fusing of glorious Mughal cultural representations with examples of difficult lives, if he’d showed us the originals,” said Mukhtar Awan, a miniatures artist.

Lahore Tilak is the first exhibition of digital photographs by Naeem.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th,  2011.