Raghu Rai

The parking fees in Calcutta are exorbitant. It is most irritating. The pollution in the air is capable of numbing anyone's senses and perhaps is the cause for a lot of people appearing prematurely old. It's like an avalanche upon the skin, hair and most importantly the lungs. When the metro-rail does get completed, it should be the most preferred mode of transport.

Eat, Pray, Love didn't turn out to be overly interesting. The bits in Italy though were beautifully shot and the light seemed almost magical.

There is a photography exhibition by Raghu Rai titled "Calcutta: It never begins, it never ends" going on in the city. It was at The Harrington Centre of Arts, which is a gallery occupying a couple of apartments on an old building from the colonial times. The building Harrington Mansion, though enormous, is quite shabby as most buildings that old in Calcutta are. Leaving aside the old letter boxes, we climbed the staircase newly lined with a red carpet and were surprised when a quiet, most unassuming old door opened up to a clean, well lit, newly painted and fairly large gallery with 52 photographs from the master photographer. Most of the prints had their long side in the range of 5 feet.

The photographs were shot between the 80s to 2005. He used large grain, mild sepia tints, very wide angles and mostly smallish aperture so from the monochromes, it was impossible to tell when the shot was taken. The inclusiveness of his frames were as refreshing as they were startling. The wide angles, the proximity to the action (and well, there always is some action going on in Calcutta), a complete deviation from all kind of photographic rules in amateur photography books, and impeccable exposure characterized the photos. I have often had disagreements I with most photographer friends when they speak in favour of minimalism - "this seems like a bit of a distraction..." and so on. Important as it is to be minimal occasionally, it is impossible to tell a story with overly subtractive compositions. I too like cropping off tiny bits of unwanted elements protruding into the margins of the frame, but Raghu Rai made no attempt to do so whatsoever. Of course the vast prints helped. The photos need to be viewed large. And he visited many of the places we did this time. Some of the images are stuck in my head. Had this exhibition been held somewhere else, perhaps in a silent town somewhere, one would hear the din, shake their heads at the squalor, and feel the passionate spirit of the city beating in their hearts... Brilliant photography can influence us in ways we may find hard to express or even understand.