Pablo Bartholomew

Born in New Delhi, Pablo Bartholomew learned the basics of photography from his father and began to experiment on his own at age sixteen. In 1975 he won the Press Institute of India Award for an early photo-essay on the life of a morphine addict, for which he received the World Press Photo award in 1976. After working for the Red Cross and the United Nations in the 1980s, he joined the Gamma-Liaison Agency. Bartholomew has been published in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the London Sunday Times Magazine, Paris-Match, Stern, National Geographic, and other periodicals. He was a still photographer for Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players (1975) and Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), among other films, and has done advertising work for multi-national corporations. He was awarded a fellowship by the Asian Cultural Council in New York in 1987 to produce a series of photographs on Indian émigrés in the United States, some of which were published on the Internet (www.m-web.com/pablo.html). He also received funding in 1991 and 1995 from The Times of India and Norway's Institute of Comparative Studies in Human Culture to photograph tribes in northeastern India. Bartholomew's work has been exhibited in Bombay, London, and elsewhere. Bartholomew combines an interest in documentation with a penchant for unsettling, Surrealist-inspired juxtapositions. In his attempt to portray an India free of picturesque clichés, he presents the positive and the negative aspects of modernization in his country while neither endorsing nor condemning them. Bartholomew offers his work to a wider audience through digital imaging and the Internet, thus exploring new possibilities for his individual vision. Lisa Hostetler Handy et al. "Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection," New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 208.