Born in 1955, Ram began his photographic education under Jonathan Green at MIT while a physics student in the mid 1970’s. He went on to do a graduate degree at the Yale School of Art. His first major one man show was at the Shridharani Gallery in Delhi in 1988. Since Group shows include the Japan Foundation in Tokyo, The Photographer’s Gallery in London and an upcoming show at the Newark Museum. Ram has also curated exhibitions including a major retrospective of Sunil Janah in New York in 1998 and HEAT , a group show of mainly photographic and video work at Bose Pacis in New York. He was also a part of ‘ I Fear, I believe, I desire’ a group show curated by Gayatri Sinha at ‘Gallery Espace’, New Delhi(2007). He has participated in symposia at MOMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London and at the Baroda School of Art.His work has been in a documentary Style, in black and white. He is represented in major collections in India and around the world.
Ram Rahman’s engagements with public sites result in heaven in Mylapore (2006) a collage of images that dissolves hierarchies of value. Within the context of the street he creates a visual collage of temple sculpture, gods, flags, abstract patterns and the objects of the everyday. While his early practices of street photography may have been influenced by Eugene Atget and Lee Friedlander, Ram developed the style of voyeur/participant that is ironic and anti-aesthetic. Ram draws from vernacular and popular print traditions, a lifetime of political activism and an engagement with the traditions of street photography to render the gods as signage and political portraits as graffiti. Working from the early 1980’s , a period dominated by the intense chromatic pictorialism of India by Raghubir Singh, and Rghu rai’s generous, even epic view of the heroic and the quotidian, Ram opens up another stream. Of an implicit critique of class, of the dismantling of hierarchies, of the hard, even chaotic compression of the rhythms of the street into a frame of the present context.
Cross cultural engagements over a period of two decades , that resonate back and forth in time distinguish the work. The Assassination of Trotsky/Ernakulam/Coyoacan/2007. It is tempting to draw a parallel between the residue of Soviet revolutionary images in Ernakulam in the mid 1980’s and the Trotsky memorial at the house he chose for his four year exile in Mexico City. These are marks of a transfer of political ideology and its survival far away from the land of its origin. Trotsky’s own position of exile in the last four years of his life, and his assassination resonates with the political histories of India and Mexico, the remapping of ideology and shifts of power. Several cross references in the work reinforces the affinities of violence, and the passing of the image of death into cultural artefact.
Reference:
I Fear, I believe, I desire catalogue; catalogue essay by Gayatri Sinha; copyright Gallery Espace.
Copyright Gallery Espace
One-man shows
2003 Photo Studio/Cutouts, India International Center, New Delhi
2002 Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
2000 Admit One Gallery, New York.
1999 Galerie Foundation for Indian Arts, Amsterdam.
1998 Gallery at 678, New York
1992 Gallery Chemould, Bombay
1988 Shridharani Gallery, New Delhi
1978 Triveni Gallery, New Delhi
1977 Brunswick Public Library, Brunswick, Maine
1977 Rotch Visual Collections, MIT, Cambridge
Ram Rahman
