An exhibition spotlights Nemai Ghosh, Satyajit Ray's ‘photo-biographer'

Mint

3 days ago

The study in the Bishop Lefroy Road apartment grew in proportion over the years with the stature of its occupant. For generations of Bengalis, Satyajit Ray's study at his residence in Kolkata was a compelling idea, for here sat the director, in a low chair, thinking, reading, talking, scripting, drawing storyboards, costumes or sets, composing music: visualising the films that would transform Indian cinema.
Ray in his study—and outside it, filming—was photographed ceaselessly for 25 years by Nemai Ghosh, called Ray's 'photo-biographer" by Henri Cartier-Bresson. A selection of 150 of these photographs are now on display at the Alipore Museum, Kolkata. The exhibition, titled Light and Shadow: Satyajit Ray Through Nemai Ghosh's Lens, organised by DAG, opened on July 18 and will run till September 13. DAG has the largest collection of Ghosh's photographs. 'This must be one of the largest such collections of a single photographer in India," says Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director, DAG.
Ghosh, shadowing Ray always, captures him outdoors with the same intensity: focused on the camera, or cupping his hands close to his eyes as frames, an image of concentration. This looks like meditation, as does Ray's stillness in his study. Thought is also action, and action, the continuation of thought. Ghosh's lens captures this internal process and gives it a form, as it does to the outward process of filming.
The photographs of Ray are portraits of an artist at work. And what a figure he is: tall, with arresting features and a towering personality, a 'giant of cinema" according to Cartier-Bresson —set against the chaos of life, yet always distinct, in command. A telling image has Ray asking the crowd at a Varanasi ghat to clear the space during the shooting of Joi Baba Felunath. His stretched left arm seems to have silenced the crowd.
But portraying a 'giant" such as Ray can be a tricky business, as is curating an exhibition from a vast body of work shot on film. 'Nemaida used film for his shoots and abstained from the use of flash. This made the task even more difficult because there were variations of each frame that differed in both sharpness and mood," says Anand. Ray's stature presented another problem. 'He was a towering personality but we didn't want that to overpower the image selection…(we needed to show) the filmmaker in a way that would be a homage without being hagiographic," Anand adds.
The line between the two can be thin. Ghosh's own words on his subject are revealing. He was a Ray devotee. Ray himself had called Ghosh his 'Boswell", after the celebrated biographer of the English writer Samuel Johnson. But Ghosh out-Boswells Boswell in self-effacement and humility.
Ray, the 'master", Ghosh would say, was everything for him. 'As the moon is illuminated by the light of the sun, very many people have come into the light because of Ray. It was my good luck that one day my stars shone on me too. Whatever inspiration and education I have received in my life are like pebbles I have collected from the shores of the sea called Satyajit Ray," writes Ghosh in the preface to Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema, a book with his photographs of Ray.
Unadulterated adulation from an audience is one thing, but for an artist, a photographer, the clouding of vision is dangerous. Fortunately, Ghosh seems to look at words and images differently. He was a master of photography, which chose him as much as he chose it. In the 1960s, when Ghosh was a stage actor working in Utpal Dutt's group in Kolkata, he was gifted a camera left behind in a taxi, 'a fixed-lens QL 17 Canonet". With this camera, but without any knowledge of photography, in 1968, Ghosh visited the shooting location of Ray's film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne at Rampurhat in West Bengal, about 200km from Kolkata.
Seeing Ray rehearse, Ghosh began to click away. 'I just used my intuition. I didn't know much about the camera, about the aperture or other features," he says in an interview. When Ray saw the photographs, he told Ghosh: 'Sir, you stole my angles!" Appointed the still photographer on Ray's sets, Ghosh took photographs of Ray and his work from Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne to Ray's last film, Agantuk.
Ghosh was a natural. For him the moment, the light and the drama had to come together. Not for nothing was he from theatre. He shot only with an analogue camera, with a Nikon.
'My father took candid shots," says photographer Satyaki Ghosh, Nemai's son. Ghosh's subjects are hardly ever looking at the camera. Later, Ghosh learnt about the use of light from the stalwart lighting designer Tapas Sen.
Most of Ghosh's photographs are in black and white—and they are his best work. They have a depth, a lyrical quality and a humanity that resonate with Ray's films. Ghosh did not shy away from colour, either, and there are a few gems in those too, such as Amjad Khan as Walid Ali Shah in Shatranj Ke Khiladi looking through the loops of the hookah coils with a lit cigarette in his hand.
'Out of 150 works in this show, around 65 coloured works are being showcased for the first time and the rest are black and white, which we have shown earlier," says Anand.
Satyaki is upset that newer images from the mammoth collection are not being shown. Besides, he says, Nemai worked with several other subjects, from stalwarts of Bengali theatre like Sombhu Mitra and Utpal Dutt to artists such as Ramkinkar Baij, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Paritosh Sen, M.F. Hussain, K.G. Subramanyan, Anjolie Ela Menon and Jogen Chowdhury.
After Ray's death in 1992, Ghosh began to photograph tribal communities, visiting remote corners of Kutch in Gujarat, Dantewada, now in Chhattisgarh, Koraput in Odisha and Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh.
Perhaps one day we will see these in an exhibition. Meanwhile, at the Alipore Museum, we have remarkable portraits in colour of Smita Patil and Amjad Khan. A delightful black and white image shows Sharmila Tagore at a Kolkata beauty parlour, her hair in curlers, her face bright and amused. She is reflected in a mirror that also shows Ghosh taking the picture—a rare glimpse of the photographer.
Chandrima S. Bhattacharya is journalist based in Kolkata.