ON THE EDGE – Michael von Graffenried – "On the Edge" presents impressions of the Indian city Varanasi as seen by photographer Michael von Graffenried, which he took during a six-month stay in 2012. The photographs were exhibited that same year in the form of a large-format installation in the city center, though they were taken down again after just a few days. The exhibition presented at ESPACE MVG in Paris from April 3 to July 3, 2025 aims to examine the installation presented in Varanasi and the reaction it provoked

Twenty panoramic photographs by Michael von Graffenried were mounted over a length of 125 meters on billboards along the busy Rathyatra Crossing in the city center of Varanasi. The exhibi-tion was organized in collaboration with the local Kriti Gallery for Contemporary Art and its director Navneet Raman. With their large format of three by six meters, the images were highly visible and attracted a lot of attention. Perhaps too much - the exhibition was taken down again after just eleven days, after one photograph was vandalized on the very first night. It is understandable that the photographs caused offense among the residents: an outsider is documenting their city with a radical view - a city that is known as the spiritual capital of India, which attracts countless Hindu pilgrims who bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges, and which is called "City of Light". The imag-es show the reality of the photographer and not that of the residents. With his panoramic camera, Graffenried was able to take pictures quickly and from waist height, resulting in a variety of photo-graphs of everyday life. The issues surrounding the exhibition in Varanasi were brought to a head by the provocative title “On the Edge”, which accompanied each of the large-format photographs. Graffenried used this to reflect his personal stay in the city, during which he would always have found himself "On the Edge".

It is important to note that "On the Edge" is the work of a photographer who spent only a few months in Varanasi. It is a view from the outside that captures subjective impressions and is not representative of the place Varanasi. For this reason, one wall of the ESPACE MVG has been dedicated to the Indian photographer and reporter ANIRUDHA PANDEY, who was not only an important contact person for Michael von Graffenried during his stay, but also photographed his home town Varanasi from a different perspective.

ESPACE MVG