EYES ON INDIA

This is an exhibition of photographs by three women who have travelled often and extensively in India and who love the country and its people.

Valerie Armstrong is an artist who has travelled all her life but for whom India is a relatively recent discovery, although since her first trip to Rajasthan five years ago she has already returned threee times. She has focused on the people, especially the women, whose dignity, sprituality and physical beauty she admires. She finds photography the best means to capture the complexity and intoxicating colours of India and when photographing people asks their permission and takes several shots while waiting for the natural moment.

Annie Owen, graphic designer, former picture editor on the British Journal of Photography, writer and illustrator of children’s books, has travelled to India regularly over the last 17 years. With enough Hindi to chat with the people she meets in the less frequented rural villages she prefers to the tourist monuments, she is in a position to record the subtleties of ritual and the language of behaviour, gesture and priorities, the extraordinary celebrations of colour in daily life, the differences between North and South and the combining of the sub-continent’s ancient culture with its lively and optimistic embrace of the 21st century.

Jane Pemberton has run her own floristry business for the last 13 years, colour and travel her main inspirations. She has returned from her 13 trips to India since 1998 with amazing photographs, only recently realising that photography had become a passion. She loves the South, in particular the buzzing temple towns of Tamil Nadu, the lush serenity of the Cardamom Hills in Kerala and the sights and smells of the markets in Karnataka. But recently, in Rajasthan, she was taken with the visual contrasts, the vivid colours of turbans, saris and huge sacks of flower heads against the arid landscapes of the North.