This photography exhibition at Maison d’Art Banjara in Hyderabad brings 1980s rajasthan to life

Anne Garde has a way of turning the ordinary quietly luminous with her Hasselblad camera. Travelling through Jaipur, Udaipur and Jodhpur in an Ambassador in the 1980s, the French photographer recorded everyday life in rural Rajasthan as it unfolded: women walking with their ghoonghat drawn low, a tea seller mid-ritual, a man resting against a wall hand-painted with advertisements. Four decades later, these images find a new home at Maison d’Art Banjara, the visual art gallery at Ashiana–Imli Sarai in Banjara Hills. Titled Shiva Blues, the exhibition is presented in collaboration with Alliance Française of Hyderabad (AFH).

Candid images

Anne Garde
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

With her writer friend Sylvie Raulet, Anne first travelled to India for Salon Indien (released in English as Maharajas’ Palaces), a book that took 14 years to complete. During those years, the duo made repeated trips across North India, visiting palace after palace. These Rajasthan photographs were made in a single day, captured in the brief pause between stops. “We were constantly on the move,” Anne recalls. “Driving from one city to the next, passing through villages, I met people on the road and took these candid photographs.”

Shades of blue

Photograph displayed at the gallery
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

A slice of India and the quiet rhythm of daily life unfolds in the 25 images mounted at the gallery. Look closely and the photographs reveal something almost surreal: human skin rendered in shades of blue. Anne, now 70, recalls experimenting with a process that produced this effect. “When I treated the film with a chemical bath, the negative lost its transparency and became opaque. The image inverted, and the skin turned blue. It worked particularly well with photographs shot in India because the country is so full of colour.”

Photographs displayed at the gallery
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

For Anne, the colour blue carries symbolic weight in Indian mythology. It evokes Shiva — Neelkanth, the blue-throated god who held poison in his throat to save the world. “The legend still resonates today,” she says. “It blurs the line between divinity and daily life, where ordinary people face difficulties yet continue with resilience.” These works have previously been shown in Delhi and Puducherry.

Anne takes great care to preserve the negatives of her photographs which are organised by year, country, city, and subject. “The originals are in perfect condition; They are stored in hanging files in metal cabinets in a room kept at a constant temperature. In 2026, the French Ministry of Culture will take possession of my photographic heritage. Everything will therefore be archived and preserved.”

Shiva Blues, a photography exhibition, is on view at Maison d’ Art Banjara, Hyderabad, till February 3, 2026