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Jantar Mantar

by Simon Chaput

Photographs: Simon Chaput

Text: Salman Rushdie

Publisher: Nazraeli Press

52 pages

Pictures: 25

Year: 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59005-445-1

Price: 77 €

Comments: Hardcover in slipcase, limited to 1200 hand-numbered copies, 19 x 30 cm

Born in France in 1952, Simon Chaput moved to New York City in the early 1980s, and quickly became immersed in the downtown art scene through close friends Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It was during this time that he met Isamu Noguchi, who inspired him to revisit his childhood passion for photography.

This rekindling led him to India, and the Jantar Mantar. Over the course of a year, Chaput spent time traveling to different places, and photographing the stone observatories that were built in the 18th century for the study of astronomy. It was in these early pictures that he developed his unique, poetic, and abstract style of light playing with negative space, a style that continues in his series on New York, Waterfalls, and Nudes.

While in the process of moving his studio of 30 years from Manhattan to Miami, Chaput discovered these previously unprinted images. He realized how influential they are to his whole body of work, and an intense printing session followed in his beloved darkroom. Perfectly capturing the striking combinations of geometrical forms of the Jantar Mantar, Chaput presents mysterious and romantic locations where one could spend hours in visual exploration. Indeed, he spent hours waiting for the right light and angles, and for the many visitors to have left the famous Indian sites.

Limited to 1,200 hand-numbered copies, Jantar Mantar is beautifully printed in duotone on uncoated Japanese art paper and presented in a custom slipcase. The book includes an original short story by the renowned author Salman Rushdie, written specifically to accompany Chaput’s dramatically beautiful photographs. Simon Chaput is represented in New York by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.

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