This photograph taken by Akhter Husain, Head of the department of Orthodontics, Yenepoya University, has won the silver award in the recently held “Better Photography Magazine Photograph of the Year Award for 2012.” If you mistook it for a painting, that is a compliment for Dr. Akhter.
Dr. Akhter, who has been passionate about photography and paintings for about 30 years now, has also won three bronze awards in this competition. His photographs showing Kambala, a destitute woman, an old man (titled Trenchant Eye) won the bronze awards.
An ARPS (winner of associateship of Royal Photographic Society in recognition of “high standard of technical competence and individual creative ability”), Dr. Akhter, said he chanced upon the rocks in the waters near a waterfalls in the surroundings of Hebri in Udupi district. By rearranging the rocks imaginatively, he got the image of a man’s face which he has titled “The look.” Is he bespectacled? You decide.
The photograph, which bagged 81 out of 100 points in the competition, is Dr. Akhter’s favourite too. “It is from the nature, has sober colours, modern, and abstract,” he explained. It had won an international award in Paris earlier, he added.
Dr. Akhter, for whom photography was a craze when he was in primary school much to the disliking of his father, has dabbled in paintings too. But his responsibilities as faculty of the university and his doctoral studies hardly provide a chance for him to pursue his interest in this form of art. He however wants to open a gallery for all visual artists possibly in the City Centre mall, though his previous attempt at it were not successful.
But he gets ample opportunities to click the camera. In the last three months he has visited four countries including the US and Japan, where he lived out his passion to the fullest. When in town, he would be out with the camera on weekends. He has a huge collection of photographs and about a dozen national, international awards. He plans to hold a one-man exhibition of photographs in the city soon on Kambala. He has plenty of images of bhootadakola – the annual ritual for spirit shrines.
