|  BICYCLE: A CELEBRATION
By Ashvin Mehta
Archer
Pages: 104
Price: not Listed
| To re-experience the bicycle we have to pedal on nostalgia. Always on the invisible margins of the road and memory, the bicycle is seen only when it comes in front of our car and forces us to slow down. Photographer Ashvin Mehta slowed down a long time ago-in the 1980s he opted out of the metropolitan blur of Mumbai and moved to Tithal, a town off the coast of Gujarat. Mehta looks at the world with a contemplative vision that explores the slow rhythms of life. His earlier books-Gifts of Solitude (1991), Happenings (2003) and Intimate Cityscapes (2004)-are a record of gentle epiphanies in the shadows of more spectacular sights. His is an eye that looks for flowers along the highway rather than the SUV on it. The bicycle, thus, forms a natural vehicle of his image play.  | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | SLOW MOTION: Celebrating bicycles in New England | | Shot over 15 years, the lyrical, greeting card-like photographs in the book show bicycles parked at picturesque sites all over the world-on antiquated pavements in Britain, in geometric alignment with road-side structures in the US and Canada, in brooding streets in Switzerland and contrasting the rebellious brushwork on a graffiti wall in Amsterdam with its gentle form. However, moving beyond the first few images the hidden incline in the road surfaces. The images in their tight compositions with the sideway full frame of the bicycle appear uniform in design. And this uniformity in turn becomes a stronger visual element than the symbolic nuances they evoke. The romance of the bicycle is experiential of the moments lived and remembered. The cycles in the pictures-always parked and totally bereft of human presence-appear too still. In celebrating the mere form of the bicycle, Mehta has missed looking at the life and idyll that surrounds the bicycle. Without that it is like a musical note that doesn't find harmony. True, well-known critic Ranjit Hoskote's evocative essay attempts to lift the visual but then there is what all bicycle lovers know-if the wheels have less air, one has to labour for the breeze. Index
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