Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Kip Scott, Transit Lounge, $45.00.
“Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.” – Victor Hugo
How true, because old buildings become respectable with age.
In fact, this book of pictures by Kip Scott, a Melbourne-based photographer, reveals that ‘old places have soul’. It recognises that our built history connects us in tangible ways with our past and provides context for the places we occupy and the world we live in. It shows historic preservation clearly does much more than preserve bricks and mortar.
Kip’s creative flair for commercial projects includes architecture, and Lost and Found encapsulates the beauty of both abandoned and living places. It’s another kind of decay and industry, this time the architectural legacy of the once grand mansions that are tucked away throughout the byways of Bangladesh’s gritty cities and green and water rural landscapes. Also in Bengal, the rich bounty of such mansions or rajbaris is often little known outside India, despite a movement for restoration and preservation.
Full-page colour pictures have clarity without clutter, with detailed captions and notes at the end that highlight the rich history.
Barry Scott sets the scene for this book that’s predominantly of architectonic wonders and legacies. These wonderful images often reflect a perilous decay, an urgency to document what survives. Drawn to the mansions of this book’s title, Kip’s images hint at the life that surrounds these edifices.
“What is lost and what is found is often mysterious – it is the in-between state which makes these photographs and their subject matter both essential and seductive. This book is both an elegy to a Bengal past and two nations now”.
Kip has previously captured the grandeur of steel, ships being picked over and dismantled in Chittagong Steel and highlights the nature of impermanence.
“In my photography I am attracted to the ways in which time has so often eroded and transformed the past, how buildings are repurposed (a theme park here, a hotel there), or how they sometimes threaten to disappear altogether (a boarded-up cinema, a crumbling mansion consumed by jungle),” Kip says. “The haunting presence of those who designed, built and lived or gathered in these places creates a sense of people outside the frame or peering over one’s shoulder. Hopefully my images hint at spirits both past and present, and in their own way are small acts f preservation. Certainly in both Bangladesh and Bengal more needs to ‘found’ rather than ‘lost’. History marks our conflicts and errors and triumphs and as our heritage buildings disappear so does our awareness of the past.”
The 208-page hardback is a cause to celebrate, not a lament, since it takes you “somewhere special”.
