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Poster perfect A poster of Chiranjeevi designed by him.

Seventy-year-old Eswar has neither a degree in Visual Design, nor has he worked at any advertising agency. He’s a painter, who by virtue of hard work and skill had become the most popular poster designer who reigned the industry for over 45 years since the 60s. Eswar says, “If you have only five seconds to catch someone’s eye, you must do something that is striking and new.”

Easwar

Born in Palakollu, Eswar designed and painted posters for Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi (200 posters), Oriya and Bengali films. He says, “Due to financial problems, I gave up studies and took to Kalamakari designing. Everyone in the family had a flair for drawing and I even publicised dramas on sizeboards of 10/20 ft in those days. In 1960, I left for Chennai as a poster designer and layout artist for movies. The first few films that I worked on were for Amara Silpi Jhakkana, Vasanta Sena, Mahamantri Timmarsu and Sakshi.”Nagireddy’s family encouraged me a lot by giving me work in films in all languages. I remember doing Paapa Kosam posters in all languages and was a regular for Suresh Productions, Vijaya Suresh Combines, Vijaya Pictures. I worked for over 2, 500 films. There wasn’t much competition, it was just me and Gangadhar. While he worked only on Kannada and Telugu films, I worked for all languages. All the posters were manually done, and I had 15 assistants, taking one or two days to complete each poster. We would do 10 films in a month, I would hardly sleep and eat till I retired in 2000, when computers took over our work.”

Eswar says he shuttled from Chennai to Hyderabad for five years; when the labs were established and the entire industry shifted he called it a day. However, he stresses that the impact one gets when you do a poster manually goes missing when you work on computers.

“Every time one would see a poster they would say it’s either Eswar’s or Gangadhar’s, but now all posters look the same. After a long time I have done sketches for a Balakrishna starrer to be directed by Y.V.S Chowdhary.”

Eswar’s immediate mission is to write a book on the history of ‘Cinema Posters’ with an autobiographical touch running into 300 pages on ‘The evolution and transition and computerisation of posters.’ I’m in the process of collecting all my posters. It didn’t strike me that I should preserve my work.”

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