Scurrying down the wooden staircase of my building that was built by my great grandfather, I see a Padmini taxi zip past the main gate. I scream “Grant Road!” and it screeches to a halt. It’s mid-morning and the whiff of memory is already in the air, as I make my way to prolific photographer, filmmaker, and screenwriter, Sooni Taraporevala’s residence to discuss her earlier body of work – shot on analogue camera. The photographs are currently on display as part of the ongoing exhibition, My Analogue World , which was also part of the recently held Focus Photography Festival in the city.
Rewind time
As I enter the lane of the Grant Road post office, I’m greeted with rows of old buildings that have been a part of the city’s landscape since pre-Independence. Taraporevala’s building watchman asks if I can work the nob of the antique lift that is common in the residences around this area. With thoughts of Taraporevala’s photographs through Tokyo’s subway in 1988, and her travels through the Pyrenees, in 1979, playing like a film reel in my head, I enter her home, the walls of which are dotted with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images along with black and white photographs of her family.
The mood is set – nostalgia is in the air and we begin to converse about her collection of prints on display at Gallery Max-Mueller Bhavan. The gallery has been transformed into a time portal of sorts, taking on the appearance of a darkroom fitted with an enlarger. Taraporevala’s prints produced and printed between 1978 and 2004 hang from clotheslines across the room. Some are etched with rust stains, others tinged with yellow, and borders of negatives recreating film reels.
The theme for Focus this edition was memory and the analogue photographs from the photographer’s archive, serve as a glimpse into various social and community settings during her travels in India and abroad. The images are from a time when developing your own negatives, and printing your own work was as much a part of photography, as the act of making the image. With approximately 130 silver gelatine prints, the display is divided according to the years the photographs were made in.
“The very first memory I have of being a photographer was shooting a film poster with a Kodak Brownie at one of my friend’s houses in Chowpatty,” laughs Taraporevala as she sits against a four-poster bed in a room belonging to her grand-uncle Manek Kaka. But her real romance with the medium started in 1976 when she was accepted into Harvard on a full scholarship to pursue her under-graduation in economics. Taraporevala took with her an Instamatic camera, gifted to her by her aunt and uncle, and went trigger-happy during Boston’s autumn and her first real winter. But soon, the then 16-year-old found the camera limiting, leading Taraporevala to borrow money from her roommate, and purchased a Nikkormat with no real idea on how to use it perfectly.
Honing technique
“I worked a lot of odd jobs for my own personal expenses, and while working in the music library, I met another fellow student Steve Jovani, who was an advanced photographer, and stringer for the Boston Globe ,” says Taraporevala. It was Jovani who encouraged and taught her darkroom techniques and the technicalities of photography. Once she had tasted the quietude and rather therapeutic nature (ignoring the stench of chemicals) of the darkroom, there was no turning back.
Like a lot of photographers who’ve worked with the film medium (including this writer), Taraporevala’s biggest battle was with developing negatives. “I’ve lost so much film, so many photographs!” she exclaims as we discuss what she loved and hated about the analogue medium. “The minute I could afford it, I stopped developing the roles myself,” she elaborates. If given a choice, she would still choose to shoot on film as the entire anticipation of the picture coming to life slowly used to get her adrenaline pumping. Since several prints in the show are her own original copies, you’ll see them titled with scribbles she made during the printing process. “S. Taraporevala ‘Palm Sunday Romance,’ Newark 1981 reads on one of a young couple she photographed on her travels through the States.
In the moment
“I also really like the contact sheet, which serves as a physical representation of the photographs. Backing up and catching up with all the new technology is so overwhelming,” she says as my eyes move toward her print of the masked boy lying on the wooden table. “I photographed him in 1979 when he was eight-years-old. Imagine running into him someday,” she reminisces. I notice the dancers in the background portraying a sense of movement, and a stray bubble moving across the boy’s face – Taraporevala’s decisive moment. The artist believes that it was during this trip to France when she actually began taking good photographs. “When I got back to Boston, my professor even displayed my images outside the Carpenter Centre building where our darkroom was set up, it was my first real exhibition and I was thrilled!” she says, her eyes lighting up at the memory.
Having been hugely inspired by Federico Fellini’s films, the works of Bresson, Robert Frank, William Clyde, and Brassaï to name a few, Taraporevala still believes that she’s an old-fashioned photographer. “If you see my film photographs, they will all be full-framed images with black borders,” she says pointing out the photographic style of Bresson. Like the French humanist photographer who photographed spectators at the horse races in Ireland and Hong Kong, Taraporevala’s show too documents similar scenes in Bombay that is still big on the derby culture.
As the conversation progresses and I manage to maintain my balance on Manek Kaka’s rocking chair, I’m drawn to photographs around the room. A storyboard from Taraporevala’s directorial debut — Little Zizou (2008), is pasted on a metal cupboard, and family portraits of her mother and masis as children line one of the walls. Photographed by Jehangir Tarapor who owned a photo studio at Kalbadevi in the early 20th century, I get a glimpse into a world that Taraporevala discovered only through these images. “I feel very lucky that I still have the home where I grew up, it gives me a great sense of rootedness,” Taraporevala says fondly.
Starting from scratch
This building also housed one of her first darkrooms, where she spent most of her nights printing until the wee hours of the morning. Belonging to a large joint family, with no space for her own room, forget a darkroom, young Taraporevala’s father suggested that she ask their neighbour the sweet Mrs. Seervai, to loan her a room to transform into a darkroom. “After I set up my enlarger, I asked the carpenter to make large wooden panels against the window to block the light, but as a result there was no ventilation,” she exclaims.
It’s this fondness of the darkroom set-up that urged Taraporevala to request Mitter Bedi Studio in Colaba to loan their enlarger for the exhibition. The studio had only stopped processing film last year, marking the end of a production process, which was once every photographer’s livelihood. The old-fashioned projector at the corner of the gallery space signals a strong sense of nostalgia, as the mechanical sound of changing slides projects pictures from the Parsi community in a Bombay that still exists if you’re really looking.
Analogue treasures
The curated photographs across the gallery space, be it from Newark, the Pyrenees, Bombay, or even Goa, have people in the foreground in a setting that gives the viewer a fair idea of the atmosphere of the era. Most of Taraporevala’s subjects are very aware of the camera, but her sense of familiarity with them dissolves their consciousness in front of the lens. The never seen before prints are visual narratives of the culture that existed at various timelines across the world, be it in photographs of poker-faced travellers in a Tokyo train, or hip youngsters in the Ironbound, the working class community in Essex, New Jersey.
There’s no one singular photograph that stands out from the rest, but its the collective essence of the show that documents both Taraporevala’s personal journey. It’s also very apparent in her images that she’s a filmmaker, seeing spaces in motion, in the drama, almost as if she pressed pause on the world going by.
My Analogue World is on display at Gallery Max-Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda until April 23 from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
