The evening light turned mellow at the magnificent Nilgiri library, as we enjoyed the last dollop of literary sumptuousness at the Ooty Literary Festival 2018. As the last rays of the sunlight dipped in farewell, we sat down to an incredibly nostalgic session ‘Me Great-Grand dad ‘ad a camera’, which had Christopher Penn in conversation with Patrick French.
Penn spoke about his great-grandfather Albert Thomas Watson Penn and the photographs he took of Ooty, its people and the landscape between 1865 and 1911. The journey of discovery of these pictures began in 2005 when Christopher found a letter about them from an unheard-of cousin. And this journey has been even more astonishing because there seemed to be absolutely no record of anything else.
ATW Penn’s legacy lies in his photographs, from which his great-grandson patched together a visual landscape of life.
ATW Penn plied his art in an era when photography was taking baby steps in the world. His sepia-tinted images have a dynamism and the bisti (water carrier) looked as if he was about to step out of the photograph to offer me a drink of water. Penn focused on creating this kind of sense of movement within the narrow confines of a printed photograph.
Historian and author Patrick French asked the school children in the audience if they would add the old photos of ATW Penn to their Instagram accounts and the answer was a resounding yes! The colourful ombré world of the modern image-sharing app seems to be so far removed from the photos of yore but I guess the appeal of photographs cuts across time.
French observed that Penn’s photographs were ethnographic portraits and therefore realistic and captured life in an ‘as-is-where-is’ condition. These images are a far cry from the ‘external gaze’ portraits of royalty or people from the Victorian era. Perhaps the realistic point of view is what draws us into the lives of the Badagas, Todas , Kurumbas, dancing girls, basket weavers and ancient dwellings and cloudscapes.
ATW Penn died in 1924 and is buried in the Tiger Hill Cemetery, All Saints Church, Coonoor. It seems but natural that the Blue Hills will hold him forever.
Christopher Penn has tracked his great-grandfather’s life with faithful, meticulous and committed research. A vignette here, a fleeting hint there — nothing has escaped scrutiny and analysis. That is precisely why I sat there in the library looking at the rich brown images on the big screen and my DSLR camera lost a tiny bit of appeal.
