It does sound clichéd to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but the exhibits at the recent photography exhibition held in the city went way beyond traditional subjects. It revolved around many social issues, making them worth far more than a mere thousand words.

Organised by the city based Youth Photographic Association (YPS), it was felt that there was an urgent need to hold such shows on a regular basis giving an opportunity to many photography enthusiasts to skillfully interweave their creativity into their lens to come up with an amazing range of socially relevant themes.

This enthusiasm was clearly evident at this twenty-fourth All India Salon Photography-2000, where 230 photographs were exhibited by as many as 142 photographers. To qualify for the event that was held at Kannada Bhavana on J C Road for five days starting from November 3, 2000, around two thousand entries were filtered out on the basis of creativity and on technical aspects as well.

H V Praveen Kumar, President of YPS, said, "It has been our practice to host similar events, particularly the salon exhibitions, where one participant can exhibit his photograph only once in any of the national level exhibitions. This way, salon exhibitions tap the maximum potential of the photographers." He also added that YPS has been organising national exhibitions on an annual basis and international exhibitions as a bi-annual one.

The exhibits in the event were shown under seven themes categorized as Colour prints-Pictorial, Colour slides - Pictorial, Nature prints - Black and white, Nature prints - Colour, Nature slides, Photo journalism and Photo travel slides. For each of the seven themes, there were three awards for the top three photos, besides three certificates of merit for the next three.

"Since last year, we've introduced the last two themes with a view to encourage photo travel and journalism themes," said Dr Manoj C Sindhgi, Secretary of YPS. He added, "There is lot of encouragement from the club for amateur photographers. And similar exhibitions from various clubs from across the country are offering a wide platform for the photographers.

"YPS has nurtured famous photographers like C Rajagopal, T M A Perumal,
E Hanumantha Rao, H Satish and Vivek Sinha since its inception in 1971 (YPS was registered in 1972). M S Hebbar, who had been the president of YPS for seven years from 1975 to 1982, urged young photographers to come out with innovative images. He was not satisfied with the quality of the images on technical grounds. He was of the opinion that the images were losing their strength on account of studios printing them mechanically. For any image to come to the photographer's expectations, the photographer himself needs to develop and print them, he suggested.

In keeping with the march of technology, YPS is planning to introduce Digital photography from its next event onwards. All in all, the event organized by YPS attracted many visitors, delighting them with unusual images.

Click here for a photo feature on the YPS 2000 exhibits

Photographs and text by Charan CS