Spanning 150 years and dozens of different cultures Where Three Dreams Cross, the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of photographs from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, is necessarily ambitious in its scope and variety. For outsiders like me who perhaps tend to see this whole region as a series of dramatic set-pieces – floods, political assassinations, Bollywood films – it doesn’t so much overturn stereotypes as set them in a wider context and show their evolution.

One of my favourite books is Fernand Braudel’s doorstopper about the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century. Braudel is very good on what he calls la longue durée – slow, gradual changes in culture and climate. He contrasts these with ‘sudden spike’ events like battles and the death of political leaders which happen much more quickly.

In a way this huge exhibition is a pictorial version of Braudel’s historical theory. There are the ‘spikes’, the pictures of political events and major building projects like Kulwant Roy’s photo of the Bhakra Nangal Dam catching the last rays of light at sunset. Then there are the pictures of family life, religious festivals and work in shops and fields – things that do change but often in slower, more subtle ways.

Nony Singh who took the photo (above) of her sister Guddi in 1962 wrote notes about her pictures which seem to reflect her sense of the changes taking place in India not long after it gained independence from British rule. Commenting on a picture of another sister, Rajman, with a shawl looped over her head she writes: “I asked her to pose like this for me. I have always liked the combination of a kind of rural headgear on a city face – yet innocent.”

Sometimes it’s tempting to make a direct connection between the oldest photos and the present day – it’s hard not to see the nineteenth century Nawab of Rewah with his jewels and ever-so-slightly winsome expression as the godfather of today’s Bollywood heroes.

Colour is one of the great pleasures of this exhibition. Some of the early silver gelatine and black and white prints have been hand painted so they look like a combination of photo and miniature painting, the time lines of the brush and the camera exposure meeting and mingling so it’s hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

A more contemporary use of colour is seen in The Stretched Canvas, a collaboration between Arif Mahmood and Shaukat Mahmood. In this series of photos taken in 2008 to 2009 Arif took the pictures and Shaukat painted them. A view of a meat and vegetable market in Karachi is anchored by three main blocks of colour, a strip of sky overhead, a banner stretched across the street and a mound of bananas in the foreground. The picture has a powerful push-pull factor – the bananas draw you towards it while a bird swooping down the street, its wings seeming almost to touch the buildings on either side, makes you want to duck.

Where Three Dreams Cross runs until 11th April. Try to allow plenty of viewing and perhaps cafe break time as there are hundreds of photos to see. If, like me, you have a slightly nerdy interest in archives you may find yourself getting very curious about ones I’d never heard of like the Drik photo library founded in Dhaka in 1989.
Image: My sister Guddi posing as Scarlett O’Hare 1962 © Nony Singh