Turning the lens on Ray's 'photo-biographer'

A new exhibition offers a glimpse of photographer Nemai Ghosh's long association with film-maker Satyajit Ray

- Chandrima S. Bhattacharya

For generations of Bengalis, Satyajit Ray's study at his Bishop Lefroy Road residence in Kolkata was a compelling idea, for here sat the director, in a low chair, thinking, reading, talking, scripting, drawing storyboards, costumes or sets, composing music: visualising the films that would transform Indian cinema.

Ray in his study—and outside it, filming—was photographed ceaselessly for 25 years by Nemai Ghosh, called Ray's "photo-biographer" by Henri Cartier-Bresson. A selection of 150 of these photographs are now on display at the Alipore Museum, Kolkata. The exhibition, titled Light and Shadow: Satyajit Ray Through Nemai Ghosh's Lens, organised by DAG, opened on 18 July and will run till 13 September. DAG has the largest collection of Ghosh's photographs. "This must be one of the largest such collections of a single photographer in India," says Ashish Anand, CEO and managing director, DAG.

Ghosh captures him outdoors with the same intensity: focused on the camera, or cupping his hands close to his eyes as frames, an image of concentration. This looks like meditation, as does Ray's stillness in his study. Thought is also action, and action, the continuation of thought. Ghosh's lens captures this internal process and gives it a form, as it does to the outward process of filming.

The photographs are portraits of an artist at work. And what a figure he is: tall, with arresting features and a towering personality, a "giant of cinema", according to Cartier-Bresson—set against the chaos of life, yet always distinct, in command. A telling image has Ray asking the crowd at a Varanasi ghat to clear the space during the shooting of Joi Baba Felunath (1979). His stretched left arm seems to have silenced the crowd.