The original phrase – “through a glass darkly” – that inspired the title of this exhibition comes from a line in the Bible that refers to our understanding of God while still alive, that our view is only “cleared” when we die. Swedish filmmaker Ingrid Bergman directed a film with same name, while Star Trek also aired a similarly titled two-part television episode. The common thread running through these works is the concept of the mirror  - Bergman’s characters reflect each other’s tortured, fragmented psyches, while Star Trek's episode is set entirely in a parallel space called the Mirror Universe. Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya’s exhibition, comprising photographs of National Instruments Ltd, India’s first and only still camera factory, plays on the same idea of reflection and location. 

The factory was established in 1979 in Kolkata, and produced the National 35 camera (the only 35mm camera ever manufactured in the country), an almost exact replica of the Regula Sprinty BC, an obsolete German camera from the 50s. While the National 35 was hugely popular through the 80s, it was never quite destined for great things. Like many other public sector enterprises in post-Independence India, National Instruments Ltd. fell into decline in the late 80s, stopped production in the 90s and was finally declared a sick industry. At the time when its workforce was dismantled, the company was developing the National Reflex 2000, which would have become India’s first SLR camera. In January 2009, the factory grounds were handed over to Jadavpur University for establishing a new campus.

Mitra and Bhattacharya’s photographs – some of which they took alone and others together – are replete with this sense of waste and possibility, of a bustling past and a desolate future, wrestling together in a fine, delicate balance. The exhibition opens with a frontal shot of a National 35 camera against a peeling-paint wall and the rest of the images function as a deconstruction of this piece of equipment and the space in which it was manufactured and brought to life. There are poignant, beautifully lit shots of empty corridors, cobweb-strung doors, vast assembly line workshops and dusty table tops still littered with equipment, and although the spaces are un-peopled, faint traces of life still linger. One of the images from the series "The Archaeology of Absence" shows a space with pictures on the wall, a fan by a desk and a wash cloth hanging on a line strung across the room, another captures a pair of slippers beneath a shelf of chemical bottles – it’s as though the workers upped and left for lunch hour and never returned. The photographers also managed to subtly capture the political and social spirit of the time – a shelf holds a Soviet Literature magazine, a picture of Indira Gandhi hangs on a wall, a snippet from a Bollywood movie is taped to the side of a cupboard. This perhaps, is the photographers’ greatest strength – to have captured the melancholy of rooms where hands once laboured, social dramas were played out, conversations held and books read.

An element of narration is captured in certain sets of photographs that the duo has clubbed together, of which Autopsy of the Great Indian Camera is most poignant. It comprises six images of various spaces around the building, each of which have a stopped clock on the wall while the latter includes six close-up pictures of different parts of the camera – the plastic body, lens ring and other elements lying around in the factory space.

The photographs offer archival slices of abandoned spaces, but what brings the show to life are the photo animation videos of the series "Photography and the Wind". According to the artist note, “The photo animations emerged from the need to record small movements, mutations, discreet and subtle variations in the space that were not possible to examine through the still photograph. Composed of photographs, the animations explore a liminal space between the still and the moving image, and invoke both early silent cinema and the photographic slideshow.”

"Through a Lens, Darkly" conjures up a series of reflections – on our photographic past as well as a certain history of labour and technology, and more broadly, the economic and political atmosphere of the nation through exceedingly turbulent decades. Far from evoking nostalgia, the exhibition documents an inevitable passage of time, people, technology.