Shoma A. Chatterji, Screen, July 17, 2009
The Rabindranath Tagore Centre recently put up an exhibition of black-and-white photographs of the late director Satyajit Ray.
In celebration of the first anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore Centre, an exhibition of black-and-white photographs of the late director Satyajit Ray captured by photographer Nemai Ghosh. Aptly titled Satyajit Ray from Script to Screen, the exhibition demonstrated once again the power of artistic vision over other human senses, especially when it is kept alive by a photographer who has covered the tracks of India’s greatest filmmaker for 25 years till Ray passed away. Ghosh’s oeuvre has now become a veritable archive of around 95,000 negatives of the great master of celluloid that began when the filmmaker was shooting Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.
Nemai Ghosh’s association with Ray began when the late actor Robi Ghosh, who did the role of Bagha in Goopy Gyne…, took Nemai to the sets to introduce him to Satyajit Ray. Ghosh then was a theatre enthusiast and a part of Robi Ghosh’s theatre group, Chalachal. This was subsequent to Nemai Ghosh’s having been gifted a fixed-lens QL 17 Canonete camera by a friend. He clicked some photographs of the shooting and went back to show the results. Art director Bansi Chandragupta showed them to Ray and introduced the filmmaker to the budding photographer. Nemai recorded the filmmaker’s life on his sets, setting it down in the subtle interplay of black and white. He captured him briefing actors like Sharmila Tagore and Sir Richard Attenborough. Nemai occasionally also experimented in colour, the first being a portrait of Ray biting his tongue. The filmmaker wrote in a foreword to Nemai’s first book, Satyajit Ray At 70 in 1991: “For close to 25 years, Nemai Ghosh has been assiduously photographing me in action and repose – a sort of [James] Boswell working with a camera rather than a pen. In so far as these pictures rise above mere records and assume a value as examples of a photographer’s art, they are likely to be of interest to a discerning viewer.”
The exhibition, which was held from June 10 to 28, is a glorious photo-biography of Satyajit Ray, one of the most creative minds from the world of cinema. “I recorded almost every moment of Ray’s cinematic life – his expressions, his movements and his moods. I found him more interesting than his actors,” says the 75-year-old photographer. This is borne out from the photographs on display– Ray shooting from the boot of a car in a Kolkata thoroughfare for The Middleman (1975); Ray instructing Babita before a take of Distant Thunder (1973) on location in Birbhum; a brilliant portrait of Ray bending in front of a wall with two shadows looming large on the wall, one bigger than the other, a photographic masterpiece; Ray in Santiniketan while shooting The Inner Eye (1972); Ray arranging the chess-board for a take of The Chess Players on location in Lucknow (1977); the filmmaker shooting with Dhritiman Chatterjee on a Kolkata street for The Adversary (1970) and his preparing for a shoot on the ghats of Benares for The Elephant God (1978.) Ghosh has also photographed some pages of sketches and notes from Ray’s original screenplays of some of his films that formed part of the display. A sidelight of the exhibition was catching some of his famous technical crew– mainly his two cinematographers, Purnendu Bose and Soumendu Roy. One also got to see young Suhasini Mulay, screenplay in hand, looking into the camera while Ray shoots from the boot of a car; another still shows him trying to explain to a much younger Soumitra Chatterjee the finer points of a given shot on the sets of Distant Thunder.
In a brief introduction to the exhibition, Prof. Rajeev Lochan, director, National Gallery of Modern Art, writes, “A flickering moment, if unrecorded, slips into oblivion. The artiste’s eye behind the lens discovers much more than what the camera lens can. It perceptively contemplates and makes the camera record what the inner eye experiences. It requires a split-second judgment. Nemai Ghosh has not only been the photo-biographer of the great cinema maestro Satyajit Ray but the only link between the filmmaker and his larger audience in documenting and revealing those moments and perceptive insights that go in the making of a film and usually remain unrecorded. The exhibition is an attempt where the photographer-artist has culled out a stimulating cross-section of images from his phenomenal archive of over 95,000 negatives spread over the years.”
The unusual exhibition reminded us that photographs are not just for being ‘looked at’ but also ‘read into’ , ‘read from’ and ‘read through’, offering visual documents of history that throws up an imaginative blend of aesthetics, texture, light and shade and life.