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Still pictures, moving shots

stark One of Kushal Gangopadhyay‘s pictures

Such is the paradox. In India where film stars get crores for stripping, a person promoting art through photography is left at the mercy of bank loans.

Kushal Gangopadhyay, a National Academy Award winner, is one such photographer from Bengal. In his weeklong exhibition, The Great Indian Bazaar, organised by the India International Centre (IIC), he displayed his genius through black and white photo graphs this past week.

Gangopadhyay, who works for a bank says, “I wanted to be a professional photographer, but couldn’t pay my bills.” Talking about his plight, he says, “I had to take bank loans to exhibit my work as no galleries supported me.”

Kushal likes to shoot people. Through this exhibition he has tried to convey the message of life simply, yet artistically. In one picture a young man, whose nakedness is obviously due to his poverty, stands outside a designer wear shop looking curiously at the women shopping.

Yet another picture shows a camel and an elephant for sale in a fair. Depicting the value of faith in India is a picture of a fruit shop where fruits are flooding, while the owner is bowing in front of a deity, and so on. All these are black and white pictures taken over 20 years at different bazaars, whose quality, he says, is that “you get everything from a pin to an elephant”. He explains, “Colours would have subdued the story. I wanted to show the people in the bazaar, not the colours, so I opted for black and white.” Gangopadhyay got many visitors in Delhi, but this didn’t translate into buyers. He priced his works between Rs.10, 000 and 15,000.

Gangopadhyay bagged the first prize in an International Photo Contest organised by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification-2005. In the words of Sandy Starkman, designer and board member of Museum of Women of Arts in India, one of the visitors to this exhibition, “These pictures would have got several exhibitors and sold at a high price in the West but here in India, no one even bothers to see them.”

Another visitor, Florindo Rozante, an Italian sculptor and a New York-based painter, found his images “very poetic”.

ISHTIYAQ SIBTIAN

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