JJ Valaya... The Other Side
Sometimes alter egos can work wonders. Especially, when the creative
juices flow from one persona
In the winter of 2011, as couturier JJ Valaya unveiled a series of
images titled Decoded Paradox before
connoisseurs who had till then known him for his keen design sense in fashion,
they got a peek into the persona that he had nurtured from a very early age but
had hidden from the populace. His talent to create art with the viewfinder that
he himself revealed to be his alter-ego. In photography there is a reality so
subtle that it becomes more real than reality. As we purveyed the opulent
images, we realised how beautifully JJ brought this Ansel Adams truth to life.
A few nights ago, at a glittering gala, JJ shifted from the mundane yet again
and with a photographic flourish, a trait the couturier has steadily made a
mark in since the night of 2011. Culminating the celebrations to mark his 25
years in the Indian fashion and design industry, JJ put together an elegant
showcase of photographs and installations called The Alika Project. This
exercise at Bikaner House was an extravagant ode to his keen design aesthetics
and his eye for capturing a moment in his inimitable style. The audience
witnessed 25 mannequins donning the waist-length Alika jacket, embellished and
embroidered to perfection and styled uniquely by 24 creative spirits that JJ
handpicked for the project because of their superlative design prowess and an innately
Indian ethos.
The Alika Project, in
collaboration with Swarovski, stood out for the unconventional convergence of
fashion, art and architecture, more because of the photographs shot by the couture
czar, who over the years has honed his eye to capture the breath-taking in an
offbeat, dramatic and telling vein. In his journey as a designer, very rarely
has JJ not pushed the envelope of his creative pursuits. But with this project,
he has taken the
We were piqued by the images, a
rare instance how fashion, architecture and elegance can form a constellation
of wonder. Edgy, stark, clean and extremely smart in their execution, they brought
back memories of the times when JJ showcased his love for photography in coffee
table books such as Decoded Paradox and The Little Book of Memories: Istanbul even
while hosting a full-fledged show at Nature Morte gallery in 2012 called The Soul in the Space – A journey of
Architectural Influences.
“I wanted to do something with
fashion and photography that was intimate, multi-dimensional and challenged
stereotypes. Also, I wanted to see how these minds interpreted the Alika, a
deconstructed form of the structured jacket. For the project, we created 25
reversible Alikas, one for each year. One side is embroidered and embellished
with
JJ admits that he did photography
even before he started designing clothes. It was such a natural way of
expressing his artistic musings. His journeys, what he saw around him, the
camera captured and brought his perspective to light. As a student, JJ started
snapping his classmates in 1987 at the National Institute of Fashion Technology
where he had enrolled after giving up his alternate career path as a
chartered accountant.
“I realized, about ten years into
design, that I was spending too much time trying to explain to photographers
what I wanted. Invariably I ended up directing my own shoots,” he says. Not
many know that Valaya has been shooting his own campaigns and some editorial,
since 2000. For Decoded Paradox, he
played the stylist, designer and photographer. The elaborately staged and
highly stylized black and white images merged two worlds -- Mughal and Rajput
royalty from 500 years ago, and the New Delhi of today.
Photographs of contemporary New
Delhi residents elaborately
“Obviously my parallel lives of
designer and photographer intersect at multiple points, they spill over and
create sub-sects of each other,” he says. He brought to the images his
expertise in the textile industry, with detailed research of the clothing of
that era. But the real fun, he says, was in the shoots.
Not wanting to shoot New Delhi in
the typical way featuring historic tombs and minarets, the couturier’s challenge
was to bring a subject from 500 years ago into the middle of the chaotic Indian
capital. “The subject, people from all walks of life, had to be blissfully
unaware of what’s going on around him or her. That’s what made the image.
Irrespective of which strata of society they belonged to, my selection was
based purely on one criterion: a distinguished presence. I wanted people to
have their own interpretation of two Indias, of beautiful clothes and bubble
lives. It’s whatever you want to understand regal as -- that’s the beauty of
art,” exclaims the man who loves the larger than life.
Next year, his second series The Soul in the Space was an
amalgamation of the abstract and the personal with a focus on architectural
details. The series was shot in three different locations and that were
uniquely connected to the designer's life.
“I was invited for an artist in residency programme by Glenfiddich to their distillery in Dufftown, Scotland in 2011. There, I discovered an amazing language in the geometry of some very basic tin sheds. The resultant images played interestingly with lines, texture and the relationship of structure with light. This, and a meeting with Peter Nagy of Nature Morte, further prompted me to discover the soul in two other important cities in my life: Jodhpur, my birthplace and Chandigarh, where I spent my teenage
“I was invited for an artist in residency programme by Glenfiddich to their distillery in Dufftown, Scotland in 2011. There, I discovered an amazing language in the geometry of some very basic tin sheds. The resultant images played interestingly with lines, texture and the relationship of structure with light. This, and a meeting with Peter Nagy of Nature Morte, further prompted me to discover the soul in two other important cities in my life: Jodhpur, my birthplace and Chandigarh, where I spent my teenage
JJ, the photography artist has
his favourites in the field. “Prabuddha Dasgupta was a dear friend and a great
photographer. I loved his work for its sensuality and his absolute dislike for
artificial lighting; Irving Penn for his stunning contrast portraits;
Edward Weston for his quirky eroticism and architectural works, and of
course, Henri Cartier Bresson for the surprises he gave in his candid
photo-journalism.”
That brings us to Phoneography, a
term that is still not listed in the dictionary but has gradually made a space
of its own in JJ’s repertoire. In The
Little Book of Memories, JJ presented a personal yet candid memoir of his
travel (to Istanbul) and more. “I’ve always believed in this well-known quote
in the photography world that said, ‘the best camera is the one that’s with
you’. Today’s mobile technology thankfully offers us this luxury and thus was a
tool of my choice for that series that chronicled discovered places and
people.”
If you were to follow JJ’s
Instagram account on photography you would actually see how passionately he
journals places and people, memories that stir his creative flight. Buildings,
structures, nature and people, the artist in JJ catches them all in an intimate
light. This intimacy was visible in the pictures that he put together for the
Alika Project. It’s as if the creations and the people in them are telling a
story and JJ is trying to pen it all down with the viewfinder. His dream is to
do a portraiture series of 100 most charismatic persons in the world. And
knowing his superior aesthetics and knack for
perfection, it sure will be one
brilliant visual spectacle…
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