The Nigerian-American author Teju Cole recently remarked on the experience of being seized, during a residency in Switzerland, by the surprising compulsion to photograph all he saw. Cole observed himself “in all weather and at all elevations, thinking with my eyes about the country around me”, the ‘drama’ of whose alpine and urban landscapes appeared so ‘real’ as ‘to demand a response’ which was immediate and also visual.

The photographs exhibited in William Dalrymple — The Writer’s Eye at London’s Grosvenor Gallery, taken by a British travel writer, internationally known for his witty, deft and incisive prose, likewise respond to people seen and landscapes traversed by attempting to capture them in the work of a visual instant. The resulting images may, as the exhibition’s curator Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi suggests, evoke moments of aesthetic insight and exude ‘narrative tensions’ which might be diminished or disappear from view as the result of an attempt to distil them into words.

The genesis of these works is perhaps more prosaic than the effect they might create. The 40 odd, black-and-white, photographs exhibited in The Writer’s Eye, of such extensive sights and spaces as the desert farms of Idaho, Holy Island’s flooded causeway, Ladakh’s sunlit stupas, the Buddha-less niches of Bamiyan valley, and the Persian architecture of Yazd, were shot by Dalrymple over the last 18 months of his travels with his personal smartphone, and enhanced by means of Snapseed editing.

William Dalrymple’s black-and-white photographs evoke moments of aesthetic insight and exude ‘narrative tensions’

Initially taken as a form of shorthand for moments about which he might later write, Dalrymple’s photographs depict subjects — such as the Mughal architecture of Rajasthan and archaeological sites of Central Asia — previously described in his journalism, historical writing and travel narratives. Yet they also take the viewer to places, including the coastlines of Northumbria and East Lothian, with which Dalrymple has a private connection; revealing a fascination with ‘austere, ascetic and windswept forms’, and point to a desire and capacity to transform a captured moment into a space for non-verbal reflection.

The artist identifies with the ‘different’, somewhat darker ‘palette’ apparent in these works, and suggests it may be traceable to the impression made upon him at an early age by mid-20th century photographers such as Bill Brandt, Bruce Chatwin, Fay Godwin and Don McCullin, and awareness of familial antecedents such as the portrait photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Certainly, some of the luminosity and formal simplicity, still containment, stark contrasts, and grainy textures of the influences he cites are in evidence in photographs installed in the Grosvenor Gallery’s new, light-flooded exhibition space at the back of a brick-built building on St James’s, with which its natural features Dalrymple’s images seem in curious harmony. Particular works and combinations of works that catch attention include one containing the silhouetted profile of a man in a homburg hat passing in front of a line of prayer flags in Ladakh, his body intersected by a line of shadow, while the sharp mountain light illuminates just his perfectly upright stick, gripped by the fingers of his hand.

On another wall, an image of the circular dome and rectangular chimney of a Parsi fire temple in Yazd, their geometric shapes accentuated by the surrounding sands, is perfectly juxtaposed with one taken from a bridge above the Ganges, in which a shoulder of pock-marked river silt juts out into a vast expanse of water, populated only by two tiny figures in a rowing boat. Still elsewhere, beyond rock-pools filled with the reflections of clouds, a lone seabird seems to drift, almost surreally, above a distant Bass Rock, while an image of concentric circles formed by an irrigation system in Idaho offers an abstract, Riley-esque perfection.

Shanghvi’s preference for presenting his selection of the photographic works as ‘untitled’, though of possible frustration to viewers who would wish to pin them to a particular location, shifts the emphasis away from their illustrative and towards their aesthetic potential — and justifiably so. The result is an exhibition which encourages us to immerse ourselves in Dalrymple’s images’ visual symmetries and rhythms, connect diverse vistas and individuals, and meditate quietly on the mysteries they may or may not enfold.

The writer is Research Lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at Teesside University. Her monograph, Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, Shamsie, was published by Palgrave in 2015. She can be contacted at madeline.clements@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, July 17th, 2016