A Long Exposure

One of India's finest photojournalists, T.S. Satyan, has been showing some of his old and not-so-old pictures in Bangalore. His retrospective exhibition, which was inaugurated at the Tasveer gallery on December 18, his 85th birthday, will conclude in the city on the last day of 2008 and move to other cities -- Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. I want to sign off for the year by referring to Satyan's exhibition because it has greatly inspired my New Year resolution, which is to renew with greater emphasis the pledge to work hard without allowing the taint of cynicism to touch you.

Satyan has been like that, truly 'alive and clicking.'

In the last few months, I have been witness to Satyan working for nearly 10 hours a day to get this exhibition on its feet. He spent enormous hours of time looking into his old photographs; he travelled to Gujarat and places in Karnataka seeking new images; he consulted fellow photographers and his own instinct on what to pick for the show; he travelled all the way to Delhi to get the archival prints done at Satish Luthra's studio; he wrote captions and signed the ten edition prints of each of the 46 pictures with the steady stroke of his fountain pen; he negotiated hard for his share of royalty with Abhishek Poddar, the charming owner of Tasveer; he impatiently followed up on the brochure write-up with a lazy critic; e-mailed innumerable instructions (including the one on the Black Forest pastry for the 18th evening) to Kajal, the show's co-ordinator; sat through preview interviews with journalists and finally prepared a guest list and called up his many old friends personally. Not to forget the emotional restraint with which he handled the lurking news of a family member's death on exhibition eve.

The fact that the man, I dare not call him old, did all this without seeking concessions for his age and without assistants or errand boys is remarkable. His work culture and discipline can put any young professional to shame.

Therefore, my new year pledge is linked to Satyan's exhibition.

Satyan has insistently called himself a photojournalist, but Tasveer was promoting him as an artist and his photographs as artwork. India is still a very young market for photography as art. The ephemeral value of what a photojournalist produces and the relative permanence of an artwork are assumed to be at diagonal ends. To build a bridge between the two and cross them requires remarkable mental flexibility and does not come easily at an advanced age. But Satyan with effortless ease reconfigured himself to the new role his pictures would play and understood its commercial intricacies. Even as I pay a tribute to the agility and endurance of the man, here's my professional comment on his pictures showing at Tasveer:

It is entirely to Satyan's credit that he allows people much much younger to him, like me for instance, to call him Satyan. There is a certain informality in the dealings of this octogenarian. There is an amiable casualness of early youth; there is the creative restlessness of a teenager and the boundless energy of a child. There is also a matchless anxiousness and a disarming confession inside him. The mellowing that is usually said to come about with the advancement of age may not have been banished, but is certainly not apparent in Satyan. But then, if you go seeking these qualities in his photographs, you are bound to be disappointed. There is almost an irreconcilable gulf between the man that you interact with and the art that he has created.

Satyan's pictures are tranquil and leisurely. They carry a pining asceticism; reflect an uncluttered aesthetic enlightenment; they are pensive and reflective but never sad. And they are of course hauntingly embedded with the stillness of time. Satyan is engaged in a consuming search for human dignity in even the poorest of poor he shoots. Even when he photographed celebrities his lens scouted their simplicity and their human essence. The questions that his many ordinary characters may throw at you about the paradoxes of life can never be captured in an intelligent caption-phrase. Those questions land softly on your mind, get caught in its gentle whirlpool and slowly make their way to your heart to stay there for a while. In this little journey and the resting lies the triumph of Satyan the photographer.

From where do these qualities that embellish every single picture of Satyan come from? You may get a range of clues in the answers below, but I would like to give a good share of the credit to Mysore. Satyan evolved in a remarkably progressive, most benevolent, fairly cosmopolitan and a liberal-human milieu of pre-Independence Mysore. He had great teachers and great friends who helped him answer his calling in life and nurtured his talent in its different bends. Mysore had a distinct worldview and Satyan carried it wherever he went. You can recover that worldview in parts in the novels of R K Narayan, in the cartoons of Laxman, in the music of Veena Doreswamy Iyengar, in the integrity of HY Sharada Prasad, advisor to three Indian prime ministers, and of course in the pictures of Satyan. Like ordinary people became an abiding interest for Satyan's lens, the common man with a keen eye defined the work of both Laxman and Narayan. Significantly, all of them were from the same Mysore generation.

Satyan insists that he is a photojournalist and not a photographer. For decades Satyan's pictures were accompanied by text, captions, historical contexts and the emotional exigencies of the time. But now, in an exhibition hall they stand independent. Even with the absence of paraphernalia that has dropped off in time, what still remains is a tribute to the pure serene of the human spirit. His pictures shun the modern and evoke nostalgia, but to read nostalgia alone in his pictures would be limiting their purpose. They certainly cross the boundaries of nostalgia to allow a sacred communion with life.