Photo finished

STET

A few days ago I went to the opening of a photography exhibition at the Religare Arts Initiative gallery, which itself opened some weeks ago. It’s a pleasing place, with a little café, lots of generous spaces, and very polite people whose commitment to art over and above its financial worth is very refreshing. Negotiating Connaught Place was painless thanks to the organisation’s forward planning, except that I hadn’t anticipated the shame of disembarking upon a red carpet from a car composed entirely of dust and foliage glued together with pigeon poop, and handing the keys over to a valet service whose smiles slipped a little despite their best efforts.

 

I love photographs. I think of them as eye-paintings, because your eyes compose available light and shade. As a child I used to watch my father pore over photography books, and invest carefully in equipment, one piece at a time. I thought his photographs were pure magic, and wanted nothing more than to create my own series of prints of my favourite television cartoons.

One day, when he was in the first flush of a new Minolta, I begged him to discard his old point-and-shoot Olympus in my direction. The result, which he predicted in muttered imprecations, was thirty-six identical frames of our living room with the television in a distant corner. To my astonishment, the camera hadn’t focused on just the TV screen as I had silently willed it to do.

A few years later, in middle school, I signed up for photography class, clutching what was now my father’s cast-off Minolta. We learned our way around the darkroom, and the magical process by which, thanks to light and chemicals, you could see the image you had in your head gently exhaled by the paper before your eyes. My masterpiece in that class was a head-on photo of a broom made of twigs, which looked like an explosion.

The next time I had a camera was when, in college in Pennsylvania, I won $200 in a short story competition. I marched off to a camera shop in town and bought a Minolta, which I inflicted upon my friends for hours on end, making them sit for reel-long portrait sessions in different sorts of light. A year later, on an icy winter day, it was stolen out of the pocket of my jacket in a New York dive, leaving me in a state of sorrow and rage.

Since I spent a lot of my time walking into camera shops and asking to see Leicas just to feel the buttery click of the shutter, I knew the exact location of a store where I could get a second-hand Nikon FG. It felt like a piece of concrete, and had been dropped on its light metre when it was a baby and therefore had some quirks, but it stayed with me for a decade producing decent images.

Encouraging friends gave me old lenses, and I was happy as a pig in muck. At some point a Nikon repairman in Old Delhi replaced the rewinder with a piece of metal that looked as if it had been hacked off a shipwreck, but it worked. My camera came with me anywhere I went, including all over Delhi. I shot slides, and drove through the obstacle course of Asif Ali Road to have them developed.

Finally, my camera succumbed to an injury that caused light to bleed in around the lens mount. Nikon shook their heads sadly and said they had done all they could. The world has since gone digital, but I haven’t yet moved on. You don’t, when you keep the corpse in your bedroom.

(mitali.saran@gmail.com)