Beyond the Obvious: The Art of Seeing Differently Through the Viewfinder

Explore an exhibition review celebrating World Photography Day, featuring works by nine photographers who capture the extraordinary beyond the ordinary

Lipsa Sahoo

Photography is often described as the art of capturing a moment. But perhaps, more fundamentally, it is the art of noticing one. On World Photography Day, observed every year on 19 August, we celebrate not merely the camera or the images it produces, but the act of looking at itself. The photographer, therefore, is not simply someone who stands behind a lens and records what is in front of it. The camera becomes an instrument of curiosity—a way of slowing down, looking closer and discovering what ordinary vision often misses. And sometimes, when the gaze passes through the viewfinder, something unexpected happens: the observer becomes part of the encounter.

Deep into the forest, searching for the wild, his eyes finally met those of the tiger. Those quiet, glistening eyes seemed to pierce through his camera lens, asserting an unmistakable dominance. “He has found me first,” Rashmi Ranjan Panda recalled while narrating the experience behind ‘A Glimpse of the Wild.’ Yet, this moment of seeing more than what lies before the lens is not unique to him. In their own ways, every photographer seems to search for something beyond the obvious.

Photographers don’t merely look; they interpret. IMAGE & IMAGINATION—a group exhibition of photographs organised around World Photography Day, which was inaugurated on 14 August at Lalit Kala Gallery, Bhubaneswar and is currently on, gave me the opportunity to experience the work of nine participating photographers, each with distinct subjects and approaches. Yet, beneath these differences lies a common impulse: to look beyond the obvious. Through monochrome landscapes, changing skies, carefully anticipated bird behaviour, wildlife portraits, overlooked architectural details, the microscopic world and the vast Himalayan landscape, the photographers reveal what ordinary vision tends to miss.

When we look at a forest, we look for complexity. In the ocean, we look for movement. But with sand, we often see nothing. Just beige. Just emptiness. And yet, unlike many of us, Dr. Biranchi Prasad Sahu, the curator of this exhibition, decided to look closely. Suddenly, there were ridges, shadows, curves, textures and repetitions. Sculpted by wind and tide, the surface becomes a canvas of fleeting patterns, revealing nature as an artist creating a world that exists only until the next shift.

Sahu photographed ‘Sandscape’ and ‘Sculpted Silence’ using a 24 mm wide-angle focal length, allowing for a broader field of view. He used relatively narrow apertures of f/13 and f/10, respectively, providing greater depth of field. As a result, the texture and geometry of the sculpted sand formations remain legible throughout the frame. His decision to render the photographs in monochrome further accentuates the interplay of light and shadow across the sandscapes. It also gives the works a sketch-like quality, a deliberate choice that, he explains, resonates with his identity as an artist.

Unlike sand, the sky is something we do notice. But do we pause long enough to recognise its ephemerality? “You could photograph the same building from the same angle at the same time of day, but the sky would never truly be exactly the same,” explained Satyajit Das. In his photographs of the Hungarian Parliament and Taipei 101, the architecture may appear to be the photograph’s focus, but the sky becomes the emotional and visual protagonist. For ‘Fire Over the Danube’ and ‘Sky on Fire Over Taipei,’ he uses relatively slow shutter speeds of 1/15 s and 1/40 s, respectively. The slower shutter speeds allow more light to reach the sensor in the subdued light of dawn and dusk, enabling him to capture the changing colours and atmosphere that give both photographs their emotional character.

There are also things we have become accustomed to looking past—the finer architectural details of a temple, for instance. Ajay Mohan Sahu deliberately photographs Odisha’s temples using a 35 mm focal length, allowing him to include the temple as a whole while drawing attention to the intricate elements that often escape notice. By keeping the larger structure in the background, he places these details in context without letting them disappear into the whole. He demonstrates how photography can make the familiar unfamiliar enough for us to notice it again.

Sometimes, looking isn’t enough. To photograph something meaningfully, you have to understand what you are looking at. As Dr. Santosh Kumar Mahalik explains, to photograph a bird, the photographer must first understand the bird itself. For him, this is what distinguishes a photographer from a mere snapper. To capture the two Intermediate Egrets fighting in ‘Dawn of Rivalry,’ he had to understand their behaviour well enough to anticipate the brief moment of action. That rapid movement demanded a high shutter speed of 1/4000 s, freezing the egrets mid-flight.

Yet Dr. Aditya Manekar reveals another way of photographing birds. Unlike Dr. Mahalik, whose photographs emphasise the birds’ behaviour and individuality, Dr. Manekar is more interested in the story a frame can tell. In ‘A Legacy in Blue,’ for instance, a mother bird guarding her nest becomes a story of parenthood, care and survival. Notably, the descriptions accompanying his photographs foreground neither the birds’ identities nor the camera settings; instead, they centre on the emotions and stories within the frame. His photography asks us not merely to recognise what is depicted, but to feel something through it.

Sometimes, a subject refuses to remain merely a subject. The gaze of the tiger in Panda’s photograph transforms an encounter with wildlife into an encounter between two observers. Nadiya Krishnan captures a different dimension of this intense gaze in ‘The Glare, The Gaze and The Grace,’ featuring a young adult tigress whose scars bear traces of battles endured early in her life. Yet her gaze remains calm and graceful, even as it carries an unmistakable intensity—a quiet assertion of her presence within her habitat. In these gazes, the animals cease to be merely subjects of observation; they look back, compelling us to confront something more than the eye first perceives.

What appears insignificant from a distance can become extraordinary when examined closely. Debasish Mishra attempts to reveal this hidden beauty through his macro lens, drawing attention to the vibrant colours and intricate details of tiny creatures. In ‘Shutterbug! At Least Let the Lady Fix Her Hair,’ a ladybug perched at the centre of a bright yellow flower becomes almost monumental through the intimacy of the close-up. What might ordinarily pass unnoticed—a tiny insect on a flower—is transformed into a world of colour, texture and character.

But what if details aren’t really the point? ‘The Ineffable Lightness of Being’ by D.K. Pattanayak features a white flower as its subject, yet only a tiny part of it is rendered sharply. Using a wide aperture of f/2, he creates a shallow depth of field, allowing portions of the flower to dissolve into blur. Rather than diminishing the subject, this gives the photograph an almost painterly quality. The image draws attention not to the flower itself, but to its light, colour, form, softness, movement and emotion.

From the intimacy of a flower, Pattanayak expands our gaze to a scale almost impossible to comprehend. Shot at a wide-angle focal length of 20 mm, ‘Nature the Magnificent’ encompasses the Drang Drung Glacier, the surrounding landscape and the enormous sky filled with the Milky Way within a single composition. A shutter speed of 15 s allows enough light to reach the sensor in the darkness, rendering the stars and Milky Way visible. The resulting image offers a glimpse of a night sky whose magnificence is increasingly difficult to experience amid the lights of urban life. In this sense, the photograph makes us notice something that modern life has made us forget to look for.

I initially thought photography was simply about capturing things we already see. This exhibition, however, reshaped my understanding. As I explored these photographs, I realised that perhaps photography is not simply the art of seeing, but the art of seeing beyond what is immediately visible. When asked to pick her favourite piece from the exhibition, Nadiya Krishnan chose ‘Nature the Magnificent.’ “It makes me realise how minuscule and insignificant we are as humans,” she said.

Perhaps that is what makes the medium so powerful: it does not merely preserve a moment; it alters the way we look at the world around us. A photograph can make the ordinary profound, the overlooked visible and the familiar strange again. The greatest photographs may not show us something we have never seen; they make us see differently what we thought we already knew. In that sense, photography begins where ordinary seeing ends.

(Reviewer is a student of English Literature pursuing her postgraduate studies at Ramadevi Women’s University. Views expressed are personal.)