A perfect shot

Camera chronicles

She is one of those charming women who carry their age and experience with unpretentious grace… Well, that is how she comes across to anyone who gets to meet her casually. But make no mistake, this woman happens to be Mala Mukerjee, one of India’s outstanding photographers, and someone whose incredible journey in photography began by ‘shooting pictures to amuse myself’.

This unassuming photographer’s cachet of awards include the Art Prize by the Owen Rowley Art Foundation (1993) and a 2002 BLINK mention as being among the 100 Contemporary Photographers of the world, while she has had solo shows at Cottons Centre, London; St Giles Church, Oxford; Sakshi Gallery, Bengaluru; Y B Chavan Art Gallery, Mumbai; Birla Academy Art Gallery, Kolkata; La galerie de l’Alliance Française de Dhaka — Bangladesh; and Tino’s Island, Greece, to name a few.

An instinctive, self-taught photographer, Mala has a knack of snapping up intriguing moments of history — or geography, for that matter; moments that professional photographers tend to miss. For instance, there is that million dollar photograph of the last ball of the Chepauk Test tie in 1986. Mala ended up being the only photographer to have snapped up that moment, and this photograph also became famous for the varied expressions on the players’ faces.

“I am not a cricket fan, and I didn’t go there expecting a landmark photograph. But on the field, I could sense from the vibrations in the air that something big was going to happen, and so I just kept shooting every ball of the last three overs,” she recounts. Well, that was quite a long time ago. Since then, Mala has evolved from an amateur to professional photographer — and from narrative to art photography.

Early days

As a child, Mala had access to a camera (a Leica), thanks to her father’s yen for photography. “But he was too busy, and the camera was in my possession indefinitely,” she says gleefully. She adds, “And luckily for my generation, there was no Barbie doll, television, or computer games to distract us from the real world and from real games, which I count as a blessing, in retrospect. In my case, my childhood pastime was photography. When I got married, looking after the family became my top priority, out of my own choice.”

Moving to Chennai in 1978, because her husband got posted there, she started interacting with the city’s veteran historians/journalists like S Muthiah, and her foray into photojournalism began. Later, during her second stint at Chennai (1986-89), Mala was invited to teach photography at KFI-The School, a school run by philosopher Jiddu Krishnamoorthy’s Foundation.

Mala reminisces, “Being a teacher taught me a lot — I was forced to learn. Once, a fifth grader came up to me asking about ‘reciprocity failure’. I was clueless and I told him I would explain it the next day. I went back, pored over books, and learnt that it referred to how colours differ in shades when photographed in low light.” Meanwhile, around this time, Mala was getting sought out by leading magazines and periodicals, both national and international, from Discover India, Frontline, Insight Guide, Indian Express, and Inner Eye, to the BBC Bulletin. And because she didn’t have the stomach to get industrial assignments, she decided to hold exhibitions of her work to sell them.

Learning curve

Then came the next twist in her tale. When her husband’s posting took them to London, Mala registered for a programme at the London Metropolitan University to learn to develop her own prints, because the prints made at professional studios she had known had always left her unsatisfied. “My own amateur print-making efforts at home failed miserably,” she admits. Much water has flown under the bridge, and now the world has switched over to digital printing.

So, does she rue the time spent on learning to make manual prints? “Not at all, I learnt plenty by learning to do my own manual colour prints. Now, if I get a tint in my photograph, I know just how to handle it by using opposite colours. In a way, learning colour printing helped me to decode the basics of colour,” she states.

It was around that time that Mala became conscious of the need to develop her own distinct style, something that is highlighted by the nuance of the texture, colour, play of light, the abstracted reality in her photographs. The shift towards art photography became more pronounced in her work, with a distinct manner of perception. Yes, perception plays a huge role in her work, as perhaps in all great artists’ works. As for post-processing of images, this is not her cup of tea. “I don’t’ do much, with the exception of enhancing the contrast when needed, to get the colour that I had seen with my naked eye,” she says.

Shot to fame

Curiously, it is her abstract Jantar Mantar series, taken early in her career, that Mala considers to be the strongest of her works, notwithstanding her huge body of work that includes photography across the world. This includes that famous Chinese expedition in 2006 with 13 other photographers from countries like Germany and Norway. Incidentally, this assignment too happened by accident. Officials of the Chinese consulate in Calcutta had seen the pictures she had shot on a holiday in China, and invited her to be part of the Chinese government-sponsored photo tour to the picturesque Xinjiang province.

The two-week travel was a milestone in her journey as a photographer. It didn’t matter that Mala had rather modest filming equipment. She still shot some breathtaking images. “The tour widened my horizons, letting me connect with photographers from other cultures and countries,” she avers.

Following this, it then became inevitable that she was invited to be the Indian representative of China International Photography Museum and Gallery Alliance (IPMGA), which meets up once in two years. Mala hosted the last meeting of this group in 2014 at Kolkata, where she has settled down finally.

Back in Chennai for an exhibition of her most recent series covering China and Kolkata, she says, “If you are looking for any particular theme underlying them, you may not find any. In my work, I tend to rely on my senses, preferring subjects that my eyes take a fancy on.” Well, her ability to zero in on the nexus of light, form, texture and colour in the most ordinary of objects — be it monumental structures and spectacular nature or mundane objects like clotheslines and nondescript spaces like a fading concrete staircase. Through her photographs, Mala continues to gift us with sensitivity to discover beauty in the world around us.