A lifer's tryst with India

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White was on hand during the independence movement and Partition to capture an era of this country's history. Malavika Karlekar reviews a book on her life and work

If you've ever wondered about the striking, determined blonde with a camera played by Candice Bergen in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, Pramod Kapoor's book based on the Getty Images archives has the answers. In 1946, Margaret Bourke-White was appointed by Life to photograph the exchange of populations that followed Partition. By then she was known as a talented photographer with energy, initiative and, of course, the brashness and nerves of steel to elbow her way in. Photography critic's Vicki Goldberg's biography of Bourke-White introduces us to a woman who had the looks, charm and acumen to entertain at the same table "Hindu nationalists, Moslem separatists, Communists, British diplomats, and maharajahs". Photographer Sunil Janah became her assistant and well-known journalist Frank Moraes fell hopelessly in love with her.

When Bourke-White arrived in March 1946, she knew that photographing Mahatma Gandhi was a priority; she quickly learnt how to spin ” a requirement stipulated by his implacable secretary and took an image that has been "endlessly reproduced": the Mahatma poring over papers on his lap while the spinning wheel occupies the left foreground. The photographer was to go on to take many more shots of the man who affectionately called her "the torturer". Soon, Mohammed Ali Jinnah's Direct Action Day found her in the "fetid alleys of Calcutta (Kolkata) photographing the dead and dying in various stages of decomposition. A year later, at "the stroke of the midnight hour" as India was awakening to freedom, Bourke-White was to be photographing a land torn apart in horrific scenes that were "straight out of the Old Testament". In Halfway to Freedom, Bourke-White wrote, "While I traveled with the migration, my respect for Moses grew, for I glimpsed the colossal problem he had to solve. But these people had no Moses".

Full review here Sify

Customised photobooks breathe life into photo biz

The Great Indian Wedding still has all the swish, colour, camera, lights and action, but one thing’s noticeably different: The way the story is told.

Memories of the event are no longer bound to garish, unwieldy photo albums that are later shipped to family. Version 2.0 of the wedding album’s here, and photos are set in slick ‘photobooks,’ complete with visual effects and customised packaging.

The killer application is changing the way photographs are printed, giving shape to a nascent industry. In its own quiet way, it is also breathing life into a dying photo printing industry. You can create a photobook for just about any occasion: a family holiday or get-together, baby’s first year or even a tribute to your favourite grandparent. In the ‘all-occasion photobook’, you get to design your photobook and add captions to make it more personalised.

All you need to do is email the photos, and have the photobook delivered to you.

Full report here Economic Times

Darkness at dawn

As the nation revels in the spirit of Independence, Pramod Kapoor strikes a note of sobriety with his new book that exposes the dark side of Partition

A partition shot from Witness to Life and Freedom:
Margaret Bourke-White in India and Pakistan

‘Margaret, you can always be proud that you were invited into the world.' These were the words of Minnie Bourke, an Irish Orthodox Christian, to her daughter. The girl lived up to the invitation, carving out her own niche as a celebrated photojournalist who documented some of the most cataclysmic events history has seen. Margaret, though, was not your everyday, hard-nosed, dispassionate observer of events. She was moved by the plight of millions as India's tryst with freedom was marred by horrific riots, loss of life and limb, as millions moved across the Indo-Pak border.

Margaret clicked pictures of a woman breastfeeding her baby even as she crosses the border sitting on a donkey, of a torso being nibbled at by a stray dog next to the railway track, of an old man carrying a woman on his shoulders, of a body, nude waist downwards for obvious reasons, being lifted to a truck, and those of scores of swollen bodies, caught in the fury of the Beas floods. The immensely disturbing photographs would have remained just that, but for Pramod Kapoor, well known as the publisher of Roli Books, but now in serious danger of being identified as a collector of historical records and photographs. Kapoor though, is modest as ever. “Doing research and being a collector is what I really enjoy. I have been into vintage material study for close to a decade now. It all started with my book on maharajahs, something that has been very well received by the market. Then I did a book on New Delhi, and this one kind of naturally came through.” This “one” is called “Witness to Life and Freedom: Margaret Bourke-White in India and Pakistan”. A largely pictorial venture, the book calls upon the reader to display both wisdom and courage.

Full report here Hindu

A matter of record

There is a growing interest in acquiring photographic archives but collectors wonder what’s in it for them

By a curious coincidence, the very month that a retrospective of photo-journalist Henri Cartier-Bresson’s archive opened in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in sweltering New Delhi the archive of photo-journalist Kulwant Roy was released in the form of a book (History in the Making, Harper Collins, Rs 4,999).

The two have at best a tenuous link. Roy’s work was almost entirely devoted to Indian politics while Bresson’s work in India includes photographing the aftermath of Gandhi’s death and an image of Kashmiri women that is one of the most iconic works of 20th century photography. However, they do leave us with the question of whether an archive has any value beyond the normative.

Full report here Business Standard

A second shot

Back to one of his favourite subjects for a second time, Raghu Rai discovers how Calcutta has changed in 21 years

Twenty-one years after photo grapher Raghu Rai’s first book on the city, most jingle-jangle tin buses have made way for air-suspension, even air-conditioned, public transport. Glass-topped trams ply on concretized tram lines while swankier cars swish past the Ambassador. Post-plasma viewing experiences have replaced Uptron TV and terry-cotton bell-bottoms have been swapped for frayed denim. Even communism—a constant fellow traveller in the city’s contemporary life and a motif in Rai’s earlier book—has got some serious competition.

In the interregnum between Rai’s Calcutta, released in 1989, and his forthcoming Calcutta, Kolkata: It Never Begins… Never Ends…, to be released in September, it is not insignificant that Calcutta has become Kolkata—a city that is forcefully re-emerging from the debris and hubris of its colonial past. For the much-feted photojournalist though, the city’s present is decidedly about the continuation of its past.

Mind of the camera

If a picture says a thousand words, then Dayanita Singh’s photographs tell as many stories. One of the most gifted artists of our times, Singh is a much loved figure in Calcutta. A frequent visitor, she has photographed many eminent Calcuttans, who are part of her collection of portraits, Ladies of Calcutta (2008).

Apart from its unique gem-like clarity, Singh’s black-and-white work seduces the viewer with what she describes as “a novelistic plot”. You have to “read” her images as you would a novel. She spends months sequencing each body of work until she has told her tale, Singh explained at the launch of her latest book, Dream Villa (based on the exhibition in Delhi earlier this year), at Max Mueller Bhavan on Thursday, April 8.

Dream Villa looks like an engagement diary, but holds within itself “a world where nothing is quite what it seems”. “The gutter runs through every image,” says Singh, “as though I have slaughtered my own pictures. But if you look hard enough, you can see the full thing, though it leaves you with an uncomfortable feeling. There are no page numbers, and the binding is such that the book snaps shut if you try to keep it open on a table. You have to hold it in your hands and read it.”

Full report here Telegraph

Kumble's new googly!

Ace cricketer Anil Kumble brings the same poise and polish to his job as a lensman as he does on the pitch
He admits he is not technically best equipped to understand the nuances of photography; yet, he has some stunning offerings, as breathtaking as his dismissals of the opposition on the cricket field. Anil Kumble, a gentleman on and off the field, brings you a coffee table book titled Wide Angle – Candid Moments From My Playing Days.

The book, shot on Canon equipment, is a delight. Imagine Kumble, intense, in a combative mood, plotting the downfall of his victim with a top spinner, a flipper, a googly, or just plain, quick and straight delivery. The same man, holding his breath, waiting patiently to “capture” a leopard sliding down a tree. It is one of his best snaps in the book apart from his personal favourite – Sachin Tendulkar's 35th Test century. “I had Sachin with his bat raised and the scoreboard in the background.”

Full report here Hindu

Landscape of contrasts

Chitpore, in Kolkata, during its heydays was home to many literary and cultural greats. Photographer Saibal Das captures its present neglect and decay with sensitivity. 

‘Kolkata is like a huge labyrinthine courtyard where an ongoing theatre performance unfolds,” says ace photographer Saibal Das. This internationally acclaimed visual chronicler has won, among other awards in his field, the UNESCO award and the National Media Fellowship from National Foundation for India (NFI). Photos from his current Chitpore series have been published in GEO magazine and elsewhere.

Saibal sees the drama of life manifesting every day and every hour in the streets of his native city. He observes with empathy and joy the urban landscape of contrasts, the amusing and preposterous, the intense and the moderate, all co-existing in the struggle for survival.

Full report here Telegraph