A photograph by Martine Franck on display at 46 Satish Mukherjee Road

Martine Franck lives in Paris and is one of the handful of women who are full members of Magnum. Like other members of this famous group, the beauty and sense of form and composition of many of her black-and-white photographs depend on split-second decisions on whether or not to click her camera.

Perhaps it is the light, or a particular action that needs to be recorded, and unless she has caught it on the celluloid instantaneously, the moment will have gone forever. Martine Franck is a photojournalist, who used to freelance for well-known magazines and the fashion bible Vogue. She has also worked with marginalised communities, forgotten old people and even Tibetan boys who are supposed to the spirit of Tibetan lamas in flesh and blood.

Viewers will be struck by the elegance and sense of design of Franck’s photographs at the exhibition organised by Tasveer and the Seagull Foundation for the Arts at 46 Satish Mukherjee Road. Which is why like architecture her work is also akin to frozen music.

(Top) A painting by Sandip Roy; one of the exhibits at Gaganendra Pradarshashala

Regard the children looking down the winding snail’s-shell-like stairwell, the phantom clouds and the strips of plastic covering the melon plantation, and the four chairs in the middle of a pathway inside the Tuilleries garden in Paris. Like the hammock and its shadow on a dry swimming pool, a moment stands still but one can’t help marvelling at the perfection of their compositions. Her vision turns an ordinary seaside sunset with recliners suggestive of feminine curves into a Giorgio De Chirico painting. Franck is also a keen observer of human behaviour. The two visitors at a gallery scrutinising the paintings seem to be more interested in the labels than the paintings that could be anamorphic images of themselves.

The exhibition Magic of Monochrome now on at Gandhara gallery has some well chosen images, all of which were not commissioned works. The gallery, however, is too small for displaying so many works. Which is why it is difficult to take in the large photograph-based work by Rameshwar Broota of a man’s thighs. It is an intriguing and tantalising work but one should see it from a distance. The smaller one by the same artist of the thumb is more like it.

Partha Pratim Deb’s installation in black and white reflecting Calcutta’s new urbanscape is marvellously conceived and executed. But should it have been displayed like a centre table?

Aditya Basak’s painting of plucked chicken with long stringy necks is full of dark humour. The calligraphic strokes bear Ganesh Haloi’s distinctive stamp.

Jayashree Chakravarty’s small drawings are intricately worked like miniatures. The gold and silver touches instead of being decorative suggest hidden depths.

A painting by Aditya Basak

Paula Sengupta’s mannequins before a piano is decorative but at least she is no longer adulatory.

Prabir Gupta’s large watercolour in grey and pink looks clumsy with its assemblage of heads.

Sandip Roy is a young watercolourist who has won an award named after Shyamal Dutta Ray. Yet to be 30, his works are being exhibited at Akar Prakar.

He is a skilled artist and his paintings are marked by skilled handling of light. Many of his works have a luminous glow. Sandip specialises in landscapes and panoramic views are his forte.

Good as he is he should resist the temptation of dotting his hills and vistas with human forms. They can be distracting. However, he can also whip up high winds with a strokes of his brush.

The Centre for Archaeological Studies and Training, Eastern India, has started an archive to ensure preservation of photographs, negatives and slides. The digitised archive will be available to users of the centre’s library and can be used for seminars, educational programmes and research.

The centre is also looking forward to gifts of photographs. It has received pictures from the collections of Gautam Sengupta, the director of state archaeology, late Tarapada Santra, the founder of Bagnan museum of archaeology, and late Nirmal Kumar, scholar, social anthropologist, archaeologist and social activist.

The Nirmal Kumar collection donated by his nephew Rabindra Nath Bose is particularly large and valuable — over 4,000 negatives representing Indian architecture in its richness and diversity. A selection, focussing on the Nagara, Dravida and Chalukya-Hoysala types of temple architecture, was on display at the Gaganendra Pradarshashala from July 7 to 11.

The exhibits included photographs of a Chaityagriha in Kanheri from the first century AD, a 20th century Jain temple that was being built, a mud hut of the Juang tribe of Orissa and a colonial mansion in Bagbazar.