Reality, uninterrupted

lucid lens

It’s curious. He is an extensively trained dancer who accidentally discovered the photographer in him, finding that his gaze on the world was more defining of him than being in its gaze. An artiste for whom art is not an idealised fantasy or an escape from reality, but reality itself.

A photographer for whom automobile photography goes hand in hand with fine art photography.  “At a deep level, you are with reality when you are totally engaged,” explains C P Satyajit, son and student of the legendary bharatanatyam dancer-couple Shanta and Dhananjayan.

Take his series Heavenly Bodies, for instance. Shot over six years in locations across South India, from urban Madurai to remote villages on the Male Mahadeshwara hills, this work is a series of photographs that frame the reality of people who are naturally fit and unselfconscious about it. Their physique being the gift of a lifetime of manual labour.

In the details

Each of these photographs feature a solo labourer with a supreme physique in his or her natural setting of work, in an impromptu moment of his/her everyday life. There they stand, a salt pan labourer, a village woman collecting firewood, a coconut-tree climber looking at the viewer across time and space. In a world that veers towards glorification, these images aspire to document, and celebrate, the real. You wonder, how did Satyajit get them to look utterly unselfconscious and yet pose for his camera?

“I did not ask them to pose. I did give them a suitable place to stand based on my composition, but I made sure it was part of their workspace. Somewhere, a connect was made with my purpose, and with why I was doing this; so looking at the camera in the eye was their own moment,” Satyajit says. Well, the photographer would make a good writer too, his words are evocative. At the same time, his photography is not the spur-of-the-moment kind, either. He had ruminated on Heavenly Bodies for three years and arrived at a format for it after many tests and trials. Eventually, he settled for the direct look-in-the-eye approach. And yes, the photographs are as they were taken. No Photoshop, please.

Satyajit shares that Heavenly Bodies created in him a deep sense of connect with the people and with environment. “As I go about externally to take pictures, another search happens inside me. My process was not only about achieving a certain image. It was about being open to the various connected issues that these people face in today’s highly industrialised, commercial and dream-selling world. How are we coping with these influences, and what are the consequences?

Satyajit’s Seeyamangalam temple series is another take on reality. This temple is a Pallava cave-temple near Thiruvannamalai, and has the earliest stone image of Nataraja and several interesting inscriptions. Satyajit had shot this series on his friend and temple historian Pradeep Chakravarthy’s request. While Heavenly Bodies celebrates the rich colours of nature, Seeyamangalam reflects time and its passage.

Art runs in the family. Satyajit’s elder brother, C P Sanjay, is an acclaimed name in Carnatic music. From the day they were born, the brothers have been in an ambience of art. Home is also the site of Bharata Kalanjali, the dance school in Chennai run by the legendary dancer-couple Shanta and Dhananjayan. One wonders if the presence and impact of arts in the brothers’ lives weighed on them heavily or let them soar. And, how did this dancer step into photography?

Photography started as a pastime for Satyajit; remember, this was a time when the digital camera had not yet taken the world by storm. “In the pre-Internet, pre-digital days, the effort to get some knowledge was huge. In the engagement of that effort, I realised that I was totally in the moment with photography. Dance seemed to carry a lot of historical baggage and future expectations. My being in the present with photography took me completely into it. Once I realised that I could do this any day, any time, for any number of hours, I decided that this is what I should do. From there on, calling it a profession was just a matter of getting in and out of the illusory economic spiral.”

It’s been a long while since Satyajit danced serious bharatanatyam, though he loves to shake a leg or two for kuthu, bhangra, rap, or any music that moves him. Nevertheless, have all those years of bharatanatyam training and body sense impacted his photography?  “Everything you do will have an impact on you; years of rigorous training does mould your being. However, you need to break yourself free from letting it condition you into a comfort zone. In that freedom, the influences work in a harmonious and almost invisible manner,” he says.

He shares a curious experience. He had danced with Prabhu Deva during the filming of the song ‘Ooh La La La’ in Minsara Kanavu. In fact, this experience set him free, he says. “Coming from a very stylised training, my mind had become stiff. I just couldn’t dance during the rehearsals. It took me a week to break free. Coincidentally, I left for Mumbai for my photography training after that.” This training was under Iqbal Mohamed, noted advertising and automotive photographer and director of Light & Life Academy. A passion for automobile photography sparked off.

In recent times, Satyajit has been raising his voice against the discrimination that exists in hiring Indian talent in the domain of automobile photography, with MNCs insisting on international talent, regardless of quality. “This, despite the fact that Indian photographers have mastered the art of making to do with little; we understand our light conditions, adjust, and are truly innovational in our approach, and provide very comparable results at a fraction of the cost and time.”

But then, in a free market, isn’t this a dicey situation to negotiate? But apparently, the field is not so open everywhere.

Hear him out

For instance, the Australian Photographic Union has a strong say, and unless one is an Australian citizen, work rarely comes his way; a ‘foreign’ photographer would never get a work permit visa there. “The Cinematographers’ Association of India has taken this up in a strong way. Still photographers have no such united forum of support,” Satyajit points out, and questions, “Firstly, is there a collective interest to make things better? The only palpable interest is to either be ‘cheap’ or hire the ‘best’.

Both are highly subjective, and when the whole industry is operating on a subjective level, this ‘trend’ will continue. The sad part is that we don’t dare to be creative anymore. We are neither process-driven nor result-driven. We are somewhere in-between, clearly financial and logistics-driven. Creative artistes are not tools. They are living beings who enable imagination and create connections with other living beings. It is this connect that brings the brand alive in the consumer’s mind. Without an art-infused social movement, the relevance of technology won’t sustain. The rapid redundancy in technology we see today is just the beginning of that.”