Four Miniatures In Search Of An Epic

Ian Berry
He’s one of the worthier proteges of the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson. His portfolio is otherwise crowded with stark documents of war, genocide and apartheid: Vietnam, Rwanda and South Africa. But he has also frozen elusively brief moments of human joy in images like this one: rains wash away the grey dust of melancholy that had accumulated on these brollys in their four years of disuse. And wan smiles conceal the hope that tentatively peeks from behind the luxuriant green of a Lonavala landscape in Maharashtra after 48 months of unrelenting drought. Outlook invited four top lenseyes to contribute an image that would best capture the year gone by.Pause, stand, stare and ponder.... 

Elizabeth Dalizel
A new-age exponent of the form, this Mexican has done the entire spectrum: from curating a photo exhibition to covering the ’98 World Cup football and working for a ‘graphic ‘ paper. All that notwithstanding, she slips easily into her civilisational habits of seeing. This image of the Missionaries of Charity at their Calcutta headquarters is shot through with this soft-focus pietism. The nuns walk around a small statue of their patron ‘saint of the gutters’, Mother Teresa, whose beatification was set in motion in 2003. 

Ami Vitali
Her camera has been trained persistently at all the hotspots of Europe, Africa, India, and Central and West Asia for most major publications and photo-agencies of the world. So, it was only natural that she should capture this rather queer aside in our confoundingly contradictory history: militant Kurds raise the banner of peace in southeastern Turkey, not against war per se (for that would free them), but to stop Turkey from invading the Kurd-dominated northern Iraq during the US-led war on Saddam Hussein. All for Kurd solidarity and a prospectively free Kurdistan. 

Steve McCurry
Fame streamed in like so much sunlight through the aperture after McCurry landed on the curry shores. His hour of glory: crossing the Pak border to enter strife-torn Afghanistan on the eve of Soviet invasion. Here, though, it’s another view he provides. Of the heroism-shorn afterlife of a brutally long war—Afghans jostling in a queue for daily-wage work outside a Kabul factory after the Taliban’s fall.