Ilaria Magliocchetti Lombi, Jhalak, 2021

Jhalak is the Hindi term that translates into English as “glimpse” and into Italian as “intravedere, dare uno sguardo, un assaggio”. Jhalak is just that, a glimpse, Ilaria Magliocchetti Lombi’s glimpse of India, the result of the last of her many trips to this multiform and complex land.
Jhalak has no pretensions to illustration, but wants to take her readers on a journey made up of apparitions, images of places and everyday life, captured and handed over to the reader’s eye, far from stereotypes.
In Jhalak’s India, the black and white, the grain and the contrasts suggest sensations rather than recounting facts; they almost tactilely express the mellowness of the places, their materiality, the clothes and skin of the people. Vasco Brondi’s introductory text, translated into English by Livia Franchini, recounts another experience of travelling to India, a journey which, like Ilaria’s, has nothing to do with the experience of the exotic and much to do with an inner resonance, something pre-existing, which finally finds its place.
Jhalak is a book-not-a-book, it has the freshness of an independent publication and the design of a volume thought out and structured down to the smallest detail. With its unbound photo-posters held together by a rubber band, Jhalak invites the reader to be an active part of the book’s experience. The images, only half shown, interact with each other, suggesting new possible meanings, only to reveal themselves in their entirety once the rubber band is removed and the posters are freed.

It is aimed at the reader who is passionate about travel photography, albeit far from the classic canons; at those who are curious to have an unusual publication in their hands and at those who love India and its world, evoked and yet so enveloping.