Some two months ago in Delhi, a young lady, a university professor, had come home to interview me. That was our second meeting but my first meeting with her at my residence. I first met her at a restaurant near her home over two and half years ago regarding an interview with me about my work. When the pandemic struck, we both almost forgot each other. I had left Delhi for several months when suddenly, one evening, she gave me a pleasant surprise saying she wanted to record my interview on the phone. And record she did for about one and a half hours before forgetting again!
In contrast, Mohan Shivanand, then Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest, had come to Delhi from Bombay (now Mumbai), called me to his hotel room, finished interviewing me and shooting my pictures, took me out for lunch, and finished all that, including lunch, in about three and a half hours.
And thanks to Mohan, he not only gave me 10 pages in Reader’s Digest, but he also wrote the write-up himself, took utmost care to see that the pictures were printed well, and on top of it, he paid me well. He is the first editor who gave due importance to a photographer’s work. Thank you so much Mohan. You are a rare gem, Mohan.
Coming back to the professor and my interview: She herself is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, apart from having a full-time teaching job in the university in filmmaking. She is also a writer, a curator, lecturer, a spinster, with an old mother to look after and many other things. Three days ago, she told me she is preparing a lecture on a photography exhibition in Kolkata at the end of the month. Therefore, I can safely presume that my interview will not materialize any time in the near future, though in our very first meeting she had also talked very enthusiastically about writing a book on my work.
At home, after about two hours of discussion, looking at some of my published work, written articles mainly for India Perspectives, a Ministry of External Affairs monthly publication now published in 17 foreign languages, her first question to me was which category I fit into. That was tough for me to answer because while working all these years I have never ever thought, or think even today, of any category I belong to. My only thought and concentration have always been about how best to do the work at hand to the best of my ability and in the prevailing conditions and circumstances.
Though I never had any formal training, two things I was very clear about in my mind though – that in my work I wanted to make best use of the available light, and I wanted to isolate my subjects from the crowds, in short portraiture with available light, and for that I always used fast films and lenses available to me. While newspapers/magazines and fellow travelers were going crazy about the fine grains, many a time I added extra grain to my pictures. For me, photography has always been an art form, and not just a medium of record or money-making treated by most others in the field.
I feel good and proud that through my work I have proved, time and again, that I can take as good pictures with available light as any other top studio guy, if not better, going against the accepted and expected norms and practices in photography.
Finally, I have always hated using a flash gun but kept it with me as a necessary evil for any circumstances when taking any kind of picture was more important than caring or looking for something different like the picture below, Sonia Gandhi sitting in the front row of Chanakya Theatre in Delhi.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and The News Porter bears no responsibility for the same.
