Sanjib Sen’s photographs (Skin, Ganges Art Gallery, October 20-31) are an unremarkable attempt at re-imagining the female nude as a fecund, natural landscape. The theme of the present body of work makes it fairly evident that Sen isn’t breaking new ground here. The vignettes, a collection of digitized and negative prints, allude to hackneyed interpretations of femininity as a symbol of fertility and procreation.

Sen’s images can be broadly divided into two categories. The first, shot in black-and-white film, resembles closely cropped images of the torso up-close. Each pore of the skin, even the finest strand of hair, is visible, but the camera never focuses on the model’s head. Sen’s use of light and the angle he chooses to shoot portions of his subject’s body give her physical form the essence of an earthy terrain. The taut stomach, a hint of the crook of an arm, the shapely breasts, the jutting pelvic bone are made to represent the crags and crevices, the earth and stones of terra firma. But Sen’s insistence on a staged and controlled approach acts as a spoiler on most occasions. There is a tenseness in the model’s pose that lends to the images a degree of contrivance. One searches in vain in these photographs for the languid grace and beauty of the female nude that one sees in the work of the Masters.

But a woman’s body bared is also meant to be a site of desire and sensuality. It is in the portrayal of this aspect that Sen fails more markedly. There is a soporific quality about these photographs, one that leaves the viewer with a sense of placid, lingering boredom. Even the coloured photographs of the woman’s naked body draped in a teasing, translucent sheet of light (picture) leave one only mildly curious. Sen fails to infuse his photographs with an erotic and psychological edge, and this blunts the impact of his work.

One is also disappointed to find that this commercial photographer’s notions of desire, beauty and aesthetics are rather conventional. Sen chooses to work with a svelte, wasp-waisted woman model. It would have been far more interesting if he had chosen to photograph a naked woman, or even a man, who is not beautiful in the traditional sense. It would have certainly enabled Sen to explore and challenge the limitations of the popular ideas regarding what constitutes beauty.

The nude as a subject in modern photography is evolving continuously. For a photographer, it offers immense possibilities in terms of re-imagining and rethinking established tropes and iconographies. Isn’t it time photographers like Sen looked at hoary ideas in a refreshingly new light?