Photographic memory

The camera was literally a box with two lenses, one above the other, protruding out a little from its body. It had a brown leather case which, when removed, gave access to the back compartment where the film was loaded. A metal cover on top, when opened, revealed a cloudy glass on which, as if by magic, the camera displayed what it saw. Rotating the dial on the right side of the box brought the image into focus. The image which formed on the glass did not feel like anything that bare eyes saw. It had a grainy texture and a dreamy quality, condensing the view into the tiny square glass.

That was my earliest memory of opening and looking through, what I learnt much later, was a ‘twin lens reflex’ camera. Playing with the unloaded camera, I learnt how to project a tiny square moving image onto a wall through the camera. The back cover had to be opened and the camera held close to a wall with its back towards the wall. Those were perhaps the first ‘unrecorded videos’ I made. The trees outside the room would gently sway in that tiny coloured image on the wall. A still camera had been turned into a video camera in those pre-digital times.

My father told us that he had purchased the camera from the scholarship money he got in the first year as a student at the Delhi College of Art (then Delhi Polytechnic) in 1962. For a princely sum of 600 rupees. And when he passed away in 2021, he left behind hundreds of negatives that he had exposed with the camera. A majority of them being photographs of family, but also many that he took while travelling to different parts of India as a student, from Agra to Bombay to Kerala. He did not get most of those negatives printed, I am sure due to the expensive nature of printing photos. While I grew up looking at the family portraits, the others remained mostly unseen.

Digitally scanning through the negatives now, most of them still in good condition, I am able to better comprehend him not just as a photographer, but also as a person. The act of photographing was perhaps more important for him than the display of results. In that sense, he was not projecting himself as an artist, but as someone for whom the act of looking at and capturing the life he was traversing through held special significance as an experience, the memory of which could be relived through these captures.

One can debate the artistic worth of these photographs, but they capture a feel of the places as he saw them, mostly in the 1960s and ’70s. He is acutely aware of the quality of light and forms of objects and structures in his subjects. And combined with perspective, they convey an observational quality and a relationship with the outside world that is more than ordinary.

In the times of Instagram, where an image is made available to a global viewer the instant it is clicked, for these images to lie hidden in a deep slumber for all these decades, with no yearning of being seen, is a testimony to the sea change the world has seen in the short span of a person’s lifetime. Changes which are continuously accelerated for us to keep pace with or to try and fathom.

— Gurvinder Singh directed ‘Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan’