Karigar opened in May 2000. Prior to this Raj Suri was operating as a photographer from home. I almost get the feeling that Raj has reinvented "the shop" as he sees it's virtues as much sort after advantages. It is a shop front gallery that thrives on opportunity where people off the street can browse without any obligation and people can meet him without having to set an appointment or come to a "closed room".
Raj spent his childhood in India and developed a personal taste for the "great outdoors". His photos are the clean and beautifully produced images of a Marine Engineer Officer of the British Merchant Navy.
He came to Australia in 1995 and refined his obsession for photography at the Sydney Institute of Technology, Ultimo. At first he worked as a strictly commercial photographer, following his artistic interest part time. On his second photographic trip to the South-Eastern Indian State of Andhra Pradesh he brought home an exhibition. He now balances his photographic work between commercial viability and "self-satisfaction as an artistic art form".
"In 2000 the Westpac Institutional Bank, New York, as the image for their annual greeting cards, chose one of his photographs of the Sydney Opera House."
- biography.
I had a feeling for his photographs where there seemed nothing between the photographer and his subjects in his last "Indian" body of work. Criterias he chose for his subjects included beauty and unselfconsciousness. In his Australian landscapes however, there is a definite romanticising of the image, a distancing through the use of infra-red film. The landscape has been beautified, dressed up in teil.
Perhaps I'm looking at these images with the same discomfort that I experienced when I first looked at a picture of the moon upside down. It's still the same moon seen from either the northern or southern hemisphere, but I turned it up the right way none the less. I didn't feel like I could get my hands on the landscape, as if it was behind fogged glass. In Suri's portraits of Australia we see fluffy clouds or light textured rock, dizzy or fussy surfaces that functioned as design in itself.
These works are certainly worth seeing.
To see more of Raj's images please go to www.karigar.com/suri
