Navin Joshi's pictures, on display at the Park Gallery, Pulchowk, until 26 December, are an innovative and artistic blend of colour photography and subtle computer-assisted art. Joshi's computer pastels on photographs show the direction to take when blurring the line between the new technology and the older one to make hybrid art. No mean feat in these days when the public is alert to heavy-handed manipulations of photographic imagery by computer technology.
Most of Joshi's photographs themselves run the traditional gamut of touristic and semi-touristic images from Kathmandu Valley, parts of the tarai, and the upper Kali Gandaki-a Buddha face, a Mustang desertscape, people peering out of windows, elders sunning themselves on the parapet outside Patan Darbar. No complaint there, because the photographic originals are themselves very competent, but what Joshi does to them is what makes this show. He scans his images on a professional scanner and then enhances one aspect or the other-the green of a flying dhoti, the grain of a crumbling house-to bring out what he sees as the soul of the image. Never overdone, the alterations give the pictures, printed on Kodak photographic paper, a dream-like yet almost hyperreal effect. 
Connoisseurs of photography often wonder why colour pictures do not carry the same depth of feeling as black and white photographs. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that by purporting to give us exactly what is "real", colour photography of landscapes and other subjects-all of which we have a surfeit of in Nepal-deny us the imagination that is required to read a picture, no matter how representative it might be. By enhancing the pictures to pinpoint the particular elements that drew him to photograph the tableaux in the first place, Joshi gives us that space. When a picture looks almost too real, we are forced to re-evaluate what we expect out of a photograph, and in doing so, we look at it anew.
Like children with a new toy, people the world over are over-doing computer manipulation picture art (which often just delivers kitsch) and in photojournalism (where much of it borders on the unethical). (See #71, "Ethics in the age of digital photography"). Navin Joshi, on the other hand, seems to understand both the possibilities and the limits. He does not daub garish Photoshop colours on pictures. Instead, his touch is light and selective.
It may be a touch of deep blue added to the sky above and beyond the packed-mud wall of a Kagbeni dwelling, enhancing the colour markers placed by herders on a pack of Tibetan mountain goats (chyangra), or getting just that right shade of brick-red in the fa?ade of a Kathmandu palace. There is a tarai picture, where the green of a dhoti that hangs in the sun to dry is enhanced with a light shading of green that makes the entire picture stand out, and the same goes for a bushel of maize in another picture, and a wickerwork dhoko hanging against a painted woodboard wall in yet another.
Born in 1969, Navin Joshi says he grew up surrounded by his father's paintings. "However, I wanted to forge a different path from that of my father, as I chose to specialise in applied art, rather than drawing and painting." He adds, "I had a profusion of ideas, visions and thoughts, and I identified the camera as my initial sketch tool, and the computer as a means to achieve what I wanted." 
Joshi has no problem with the fact that he is using the aid of the computer to bring photographic art to the public. "My exploration of photography made me realise that every photograph is actually a manipulation, in framing, use of lenses, filters, camera formats, kinds of colour film, and darkroom manipulation." Joshi talks about Ansel Adams' work and how he used techniques like dodging and burning extensively to achieve the effects he wanted. "Computer technology is my darkroom," he explains. "I am merely extending the arena of traditional manipulation."
Adams' work is, interestingly, the example Susan Sontag used in her extended essay "On Photography", in which she discusses how photographs seem to be over-valued even as societies become saturated with images. She asks how, when faced with the grandeur and overt realness of Adams photographs of Yosemite National Park, one cannot but be a little underwhelmed by the sight of the original. One might ask something similar of Joshi's work, or indeed, of much of the photography that the power of Nepal's landscapes inspires, sometimes unfortunately, whether in tourism brochures or coffee table books. (Much of this photography has been manipulated, whether to heighten the velvety golden sheen to Himalayan icefields in the evening sun, or bring the jungles of Chitwan into your living room.)
Work like Joshi's can function in two ways to save us from both the tackiness we so often have to suffer, and the other extreme, the faint disbelief in the actual scene itself, should we see it, since it does not match the photograph we remember. Joshi's "manipulation" is more obvious than that in Adams' work, and far more artistic than virtually any touristy pictures. In walking this fine line, Joshi forces us to think about the place of photography as an art form in contemporary Nepali society. His work is obviously neither in the world of brush and paint nor in the world of cameras and darkrooms, as we understand them both. And the realisation of this difference makes us think about what photography can and cannot do and ask whether all we expect from it is justified. It reminds us always that we are, after all, looking at an image, at one of many possible representations of one person's perception of reality.
(Colour from the world around us, photo exhibition by Navin Joshi. Park Gallery, Pulchowk, through 26 December. 522307)
