Time & Tide is comprised of photographs drawn from two bodies of work by Karan Kapoor. The first, the genesis of his interest in photography, are photographs from the 1980s of older Anglo-Indians. An Anglo-Indian himself, Kapoor was interested in a people who found themselves caught between the racial divide, and since the end of the British Empire, in a steadily changing world. He writes, “I was more interested in the older generations as they seemed to be the last remaining remnants of the British Raj – people who remembered the railway cantonments, the Marilyn Monroe look-a-like contest, the ‘Central Provinces’, and so on, a world long gone.”
This idea of a world, no longer present or fast fading, also forms a central thread in Kapoor’s photographs of Goa. Taken around the same time, these photographs attempt to capture the last of ‘Portugal Goa’. Although Goan Catholics, probably the largest inheritors and key defenders of their Portuguese heritage continue to exist in Goa today, their numbers have steadily declined over the years.
The photographs in this exhibition therefore, are an exploration in niche community identities that are in a certain sense, also cultures in preserve. Though these communities continue to exist in different forms and numbers today, Kapoor’s black and white photographs showcase a remarkable fossilised window into their world, capturing the end of an era, and as he remarks of the Anglo-Indians, “the last of a dying breed.”