Razaq Vance’s love for nature and the rural culture dates back to his early childhood. He remembers his excitement as a young boy while diving into a water channel to catch the coloured dry eucalyptus leaves floating in the water. Youngest among his seven siblings, he was born to a family of farmers, with small landholding in village Rssiana near Samundri, a small town at an hour’s drive from Faisalabad.

“I loved spending time in fields, the curiosity to study life and nature led me to opt for zoology rather than going for some other subject.”

While doing MSc Zoology at the Government College Lahore, he developed a passion for photography. He was a frequenter to the northern areas with college fellows where they would shoot natural scenes and the life of locals which gradually increased his interest in photography.”

Vance joined the Govt Postgraduate College Samundri as a lecturer in 1995 where he is working till date. The same year, he bought his first professional SLR camera. For him it was fun to develop black and white prints with a Russian developer he bought for Rs800 on inexpensive poor quality paper with very cheap chemicals.

“I always enjoyed the process, from camera click to the final print. This enthusiasm served as a fuel to move on as a photographer,” he relates his story.

Vance’s initial works were appreciated and he got awards in the photography competitions in Islamabad and Lahore.

“Initially, I used to click randomly but exposing mundane life remained my romance. It was the time when images of landscape and mountains and pictorial portraits were considered the only subjects for photography.

“The images printed on wall calendars were idealised. In contrast to existing trends, I was portraying rural life and was ridiculed by the contemporaries as a photographer, focusing ‘koora karkat’ (trash),” he recalls.

The perception about Vance’s works changed when they received awards twice by prestigious International Asahi Shimbun Photography Salon in Japan 12 years back.

“After my works got international acclaim, the contemporary photographers would say ‘we will also photograph this ‘trash’ because the ‘gora’ (white man) has a taste for it,” he says in a lighter tone.

With four solo shows in Pakistan and participations in major group shows abroad to his credit, Vance, unlike others, rarely travelled for photography and dedicated himself to portraying life in his neighbourhood and surrounding villages for almost two decades. He learnt negative mixing in darkroom and created extraordinary surrealist rural landscapes by blending two or more negatives.

Humble and simple Razaq Vance masters most of the technical skills by experimentation with very ordinary equipment at hand. He groomed himself by studying works of local and international photographers, including Nisar Mirza, M R Owaisi, Galen Rowell, Shiro Shirahata and Sebastiao Salgado. He is grateful to senior photographers, Samiur Rehman and Nisar Mirza for their kind support and guidance.

Staying a major part of his life in a small village helped him to develop an intimacy with local light, fog, colours and people. He works with a minimalistic approach, exposing very common subjects he is living with. The farmers walking on mud tracks to their lush green fields, artisans working in a rustic environment, dry trees with birds and moon, camels, cart races, tent pegging, scenes from the local festivals and portraits of common folks are the mainstay of his works.

Vance’s beautifully composed images carry the aura of a slow-pace life existing close to the nature. The hints of his nostalgia for black and white images are visible in his recent digital works in which the colourful subjects are composed against misty grey backgrounds. Most of his photographs exposed in the evenings and the mornings are soft and rich in hues. He works against the light and creates dramatic images with unusual colours.

Published in Dawn, April 9th, 2017