New Delhi: Can a photograph simultaneously convey a sense of distance and proximity?

If it's been taken by a student of prominent German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, it most certainly can - as is evident at an exhibition underway here.

For Indians, who are viewing the works of the Becher protégés for the first time, the frames are a visual treat.

A 19-day exhibition at the Vadehra Art Gallery titled "Distance and Proximity" that opened July 12 is displaying 76 masterpieces shot by some of the illustrious students of the Bechers.

The lensmen include Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Axel Hutte, Simone Nieweg, Jorg Sasse, Thomas Struth and Petra Wunderlich. The exhibition has been brought to India jointly by the gallery and the Goethe Institute.

The photographs of varying sizes span two realistic decades of German photography - 1967 to 1992 - when lensmen were experimenting with space, distance and geometric precision by photographing snatches of everyday life.

The exhibition has previously toured Karachi and Kolkata. Part of a larger series, "Photography in Germany from 1850 to the Present", the exhibition has been conceived and executed by Wulf Herzogenrath and Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations).

It showcases that era in German photography when important technical and artistic developments were taking place in the medium.

A colour series of German interiors comprising eight frames shot by Thomas Ruff stands out for its composition and artistry. Ruff, born in Harmersbach in Germany in 1958 and a student of the National Academy of Arts, Dusseldorf between 1977 and 1982, believes photography can only capture the surface of things, conveying what he describes the "authenticity of a manipulated and pre-arranged reality".

The series shot in 1983 turns seemingly innocuous subjects like mantelpiece memorabilia, bedspreads, pillows, cushions and framed photographs into objets d'art. A photograph of a cupboard and wall cabinet in cream, beige and red gives the feel of the proximity of the two independent objects and yet brings out the distance between them in terms of utility. Most of Ruff's colour codes are muted.

Similarly, Simone Nieweg's seven-frame garden series is a study in perception and an intuitive feel for the proximity of natural shapes.

She turns backyard vegetable gardens and neighbouring fields into new landscapes where a lone turnip is protected by a canopy of leaves, a giant green Savoy cabbage flourishes in grand isolation and spring bean shrubs and leek rub shoulders with a heap of compost.

Neiweg is fascinated by the working methods of planters, which could be called primitive on gardens that are like overgrown wilderness.

Unlike the Bechers, whose dispassionate, uninflected images of abandoned industrial sites and medieval houses were always printed in black-and-white in relatively small scale and arranged in series, their students always embraced colours and billboard scale that has given still photography the power to take on video and films in the mechanically reproduced world of high art.