Satyajit through the looking glass

Nemai Ghosh’s book of photographs of his mentor Satyajit Ray, of film “stills” of Ray’s movie productions with some photographs of other filmmakers thrown in for good measure, is not only an incredible, nostalgic journey into the film world of the ’70s and ’80s but also a testament to the craft and perseverance of Ghosh himself. This 360-page book, with as many pictures within it, has images from the time that Ghosh took up photography at the age of 33 — when he first visited and photographed the sets of Ray’s film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne — until as recently as 2006, when he shot on the sets of Sandip Ray’s Bankubabur Bandhu.

Most of the photographs are in classical black and white, and with four well-referenced essays by Pramod Kumar KG, Jai Arjun Singh, Aveek Sen and Sabeena Gadihoke, the book is a compelling document of Bengali cinema’s golden period and of Ghosh’s almost casual, yet breathtaking, style.

In the Director’s Note, we’re told by Ashish Anand of Delhi Art Gallery that this collection of images is culled from the recently-purchased photographic archive of Ghosh, which contains 120,000 pictures; it must have been a daunting task to select only 0.3 per cent of the photographic material available. We hope that Anand will continue to build more such collections of photographs.

Ray was to Ghosh both mentor and muse; and, in turn, Ghosh was the only photographer allowed on Ray’s film sets and in his home. Several powerful and contemplative images of Ray — on set, behind the camera, in his study composing music, sketching or being plain contemplative and, in particular, a series inside the “dicky” of an Ambassador — testify to Ghosh’s deep admiration of Ray.

Given that Ray never paid Ghosh for this photography, which spanned the last 23 years of Ray’s life, one must assume that Ghosh’s doggedness stemmed from a deep respect for Ray and his artistic sensibilities.

This, perhaps, is the reason so many of these images, unlike film “stills” that mimic what the camera sees, provide a point of view in which both the film camera and the entire film-making process become the subject. The book encourages you to feel as if you’re simultaneously within a film and its memorable scenes but also standing outside it, a witness to its lighter moments and the human essence of its stars. As Aveek Sen writes in the introduction, “There is a richness of confusion when an intelligent photographer shoots the shooting of a film. What we are made to look at are not film stills but film making stills — a bewildering transformation of the staging of cinematic fiction into a real event that ‘actually happened’”.

These pages shine with India’s golden film stars. Shabana Azmi, Victor Banerjee, Utpal Dutt, Smita Patil, Babita, Amjad Khan, Sharmila Tagore, Rekha and many others are all photographed unselfconsciously, as if the photographer had become a part of their lives.

The photographs have been superbly printed; there’s so much detail to examine in some of them that one wishes they’d been enlarged. Each one is captioned with thoughtful information. My only problem with this wonderful book is that certain sections seem to be more about Ray and cinema and less about Ghosh, particularly when it dwells on Ray’s sketches. Then again, perhaps these two stars were always inseparable.

The reviewer is a photographer, panoramist and panoramologist

NEMAI GHOSH
SATYAJIT RAY AND BEYOND
Author: Nemai Ghosh
Publisher: Delhi Art Gallery
Pages: 363
Price: Rs 6,000