Shades of grey

A lonely, intrepid photojournalist at a time when photojournalism itself was a nascent concept, devoid of the breeziness it has today, thousands of negatives in mouldy cardboard boxes, a young photographer unaware of what he had in his possession. Quite a script. It's all out now in the public domain, 336 hardbound pages containing within the visual archives of Kulwant Roy, painstakingly put together by photographer Aditya Arya, Roy’s nephew.

At the book launch, Gopal Gandhi spoke eloquently of Roy’s art. "Why do black and white pictures appeal in a way colour pictures do not? This is, I think, because black and white pictures are not made of those two polar opposites, those two extremes. Black and white pictures are about grey and the greys of life, the uncertainties, the dilemmas, the half-tones of that intermediacy which is the name of most of human moments, the frame of mind that knows no name, the mood that cannot be put into a description the texture of waiting, of expectation, of the undigited digit of life, the undated day, the unnamed sentiment, not ghulami or azadi, but arzu and intezari.

"Kulwant Roy’s photographs in black and white, but in reality grey-brown, and printed in sepia have the un-named, un-identified and unpredictable graininess of natural gur, as opposed to the brash and branded self-advertising symmetry of a sugarcube. They have the aroma, as indefinable as it is real, of home-ground berries of coffee, as opposed to the dust that goes by the name of the brew."
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HISTORY IN THE MAKING: THE VISUAL ARCHIVES OF KULWANT ROY
Authors: Aditya Arya and Indivar Kamtekar
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 336
Price: Rs 4999