A writer, art critic, curator, painter and poet, is how Bartholomew is remembered. Bartholomew’s love for literature and art remained lifelong companions and he became one of the finest voices in art criticism in India. He was one of the first art critics to start a serious dialogue with the painters of his time. He created a community with them and engendered a sense of direction at a time when the public was not fully receptive to the bold artistic exploration of India’s Progressive Art Movement. His photographs however, remained a more private introspection of life around him and were rarely exhibited.

The sfumato effect of Bartholomew's black and white photographs comes from shooting in natural light, inside homes, under weak bulbs, or in dusky exteriors and under dim streetlights. It comes from working with cheaper film pushed to the limit; from a tonal range devised in his father Richard Bartholomew's home-made darkroom. Adjusting technical means to aesthetic ends, he seems to privilege a sedimented image that denotes becoming, as it does mortality. In the cycle of life and death so readily acted out by the young, what remains tantalizing is the lightness with which the existential burden of death is nurtured, coddled, tossed and relayed.

Extracted from Geeta Kapur’s essay "Familial Narratives and their Accidental Denouncements", from the catalog of exhibition, Where Three Dreams Cross.