In September 2015, at the National Gallery of Modern Art,
New Delhi, I stood before the large black and white photographic prints by the
departed photography artist Prabuddha Dasgupta. His photographs have a brooding
quality, the expressions of those faithful dogs as expressed by the noted poet
Kamala Das, who dispassionately look at the master and in a moment’s cue pounce
on her with all the love it could muster up. From within the frames, very
concrete, sensual but ethereal images gaze into the space overlooking your
presence. And you wonder whether Prabuddha really was an advertising
photographer or not. Generally advertising photographers make the models gaze
back at the viewers inviting them into the secret pleasures of the products
that they advertise mediated through/by their bodies. Prabuddha’s advertising
photographs also have the same ruminating look and feel about them. They almost
tell you like ‘buy if you want and if you do not want still you can look at me
for I look back at you with all the compassion that I have for you.’ It is not my
misreading because Prabuddha himself has said in one of his writings that
though he likes to keep his advertising photography separate from his personal
photography experiences (not really experiments) somehow his subjectivity seeps
into those. It all depends on the client who gives the inputs and in the case of Prabuddha, the photographs tell us that he seems to have always been lucky with
the obliging clients and more than willing models.
(work by Prabuddha)
Spreading shock waves amongst the large circle of friends,
artists, clients, models and the general fashion world on 12th
August 2012, Prabuddha passed away after a massive heart attack. Like his
photographs, his death too was an occasion for his friends to think about the
beauty of life in general and the beauty that he had created in his works.
Above all it was an occasion to find the temporality of life that time and
again Prabuddha had experienced in his innumerable trips to the remote
locations for professional as well as personal purposes. Suddenly his friends
thought of their own life and death. How can a person born in 1956 pass away in
2012 just before completing his sixty years on this earth. Prabuddha never
looked sixty; not even fifty six, which was his real age when death claimed
him. He looked like a man frozen in time at some point of his youth. Like his
model, Milind Soman, Prabuddha too grew younger and sober with age. The sort of
casualness that Prabuddha carried in his demeanour told us how he was a real
Leonard Cohen child; the poet singer whom he considered his spiritual Guru. He
crossed over from twentieth century to the twenty first. But 1970s, the most beautiful
and rebellious period of the last century was his refuge like many in the
intellectual and creative firmament in the world, like his fellow photographer,
Pablo Bartholomew. These men never grew out of rebellion; like the embers they
carried it all along their lives.
(Work by Prabuddha)
It is not meant to be an obituary but an appreciation of his
works and his words. I was there on the condolence meeting day at the premises
of the NGMA. Prabuddha’s brother, ace photographer Pradeep Dasgupta spoke of
their childhood, especially the childhood they had spent together at the very
premises then the condolence meeting was in progress. Their father Prodosh
Dasgupta (I had a wonderful opportunity to write about Prodosh Dasgupta in a commemorative
volume and have been lucky to know the Dasgupta siblings through their close
friend and brother, artist K.S.Radhakrishnan) was the director of the NGMA and
they lived in the same building. Prabuddha in his writings remembers how he had
spent his summers in the spacious halls of the NGMA just to beat the heat
outside and slowly fell in love with the works of Amrita Sherghil. The women
with suppressed desires that touch upon innocent eroticism, with their ‘upturned’
breasts had enthralled the boy. While writing about how he became a
photographer of female beauty in their naturalness, Prabuddha has mentioned how
he spent his childhood days amongst the female figures sculpted by his father
and in their various stages of completion. Hence, in his own admission, when he
got the camera in his hand, he turned the ‘gaze’ of the camera and that of his
own towards the contours of female beauty.
(work by Prabuddha)
When I stood before those works in September this year, I
thought Prabuddha was also somewhere there with his childhood noise echoing within
the white halls where now his black and white photographs hung. More than on
the condolence day, though Pradeep had spoken about life coming a full circle
there, I felt that it was with this exhibition that Prabuddha’s life had come
to a full circle. He would not have preferred a solo exhibition or a
retrospective in the country’s prime institution for art in whose premises he
had grown up; the rebel in his mind would have said it several times that a
retrospective at the age of fifty six was a sort of luxury that could be
enjoyed by the mainstream artists. He never considered himself a mainstream
artist though he had worked for so many international brands including Vogue, Elle,
Louis Vutton and so on. But there were efforts already on by several agencies
to give him a mainstream artist’s status which resulted in the publication of
his books and also in the centre stage given to him in the Delhi Photo Festival
in 2011. Prabuddha has always been a star of his own shine but he chose to
remain behind his works. In a city where artists vie for page three attention
after gaining a moderate success in the market, wearing so many revealing but
ill fitting clothes and distorted body language, Prabuddha was an exception. Aesthetical
upbringing for the Dasgupta brothers was so grounded that they did not ever
feel the need to flaunt even if they had it in abundance. A cursory look at the
documentation of his speech at the DPF 2011 would tell us how solid, ground and
yet beyond the ground was he in his approach to his photography and life.
(work by Prabuddha)
As a man who photographed so many women in their naturalness
and so many women with their baby bumps Prabuddha had unnecessarily earned a name
of being a lady’s man. But his works never says anything about his flirtations
or something more with women who modelled for him. In a suppressed society like
ours, we take it for granted that a person who photographs women in their naturalness
definitely sleeps with them or these women are so desperate that for assignments
they would go to any extent to please the photographer. Here I do not want to
whitewash the personal history of Prabuddha, instead my idea is to tell you
that his works on women do not say that he was a photographer who was looking
for skin and private parts of women. In all the photographs of women that he
has taken what we see is his intense respect and love for the subject. Not even
once, the viewer feels like shying away from his works because they would embarrass
him/her, instead one would feel like looking at them with the same compassion
that the artist had felt for his subjects. They are erotic only in a limited
sense; they are sensuous. Like the tingling behind our back and each attempt to
scratch it giving a sort of disembodied pleasure, these photographs give us a
sense of disembodied erotic feeling. It is there at the same it is not there.
Each time we look for ‘it’ we get to see the beauty of the people who are
involved, the abstraction of the images and also the structure of the
photograph as a whole. The same sensuousness is there when Prabuddha finds
images that resemble sexual organs of the human beings. But they do not evoke
the base passions of the human beings as done by pornographic images or the
close up of body parts that suggest displaced sexual organs.
(work by Prabuddha)
Prabuddha himself has said that his attempts to capture
women in their naturalness were disastrous in the beginning. Those attempts
shamed him and all his efforts were to get it right. He was not looking for the
human body but was looking for something which he would get in his trips to
Ladakh. The expanses of Ladakh induced him with a sense of eternity and
humility. He spoke to the people who he rarely met along the way, through
gestures and holding hands. Each time he saw the people there, all alone and
always aware of the connectedness of things and natural elements, he too
understood the meaning or meaninglessness of life. That spiritual sublimation
which cannot be expressed through words was what Prabuddha always attempted
bring in his life and works. It is not an easy thing. Life comes like a storm
that he had experienced once in Ladakh. He thought it would kill him and he
felt death and life at the same moment. It was fear initially and then it was
reconciliation next and finally it was a dazed feeling. Prabuddha always wanted
this in his works. Whenever he trained his camera at any subject he wanted to
get that feeling and in Ladakh he realized that it was what he had been
searching for all this while. But he was not that kind of a spiritual person
in the common sense. He did not wear his spirituality on his sleeves. He lived
a passionate life and loved life as if there was no tomorrow.
(work by Prabuddha)
However, as Geoff Dyer says in the prologue for Prabuddha’s
book ‘Longings’, lovers do not copulate always as one would think. They do go
for shopping, driving, walking or they just have a dinner together. So Dyer
warns that anybody who tends to misinterpret the works of Prabuddha in the light
of sensuousness or eroticism they are obviously going to miss the point of his works.
As an artist his concerns were not copulating endlessly as one would imagine. Prabuddha
chose to work with black and white because he liked the way a silver print was
done in the dark room. He was a purist to an extent and it was difficult for
him to leave the film based photography for digital photography. Once he
chanced upon the works of another photographer and thought that they were
gorgeous in their prints. Upon asking he got the answer that it was
inkjet-printed photographs. It was a revelation for Prabuddha and he learnt a
bit of photoshop so that he could also use inkjet printer and digital
photography. There was also some false belief in Prabuddha as he accepts in
his writings. Like many artists he thought that if he could not involve with a
subject for a long time whatever he comes out with would be superficial. Then
he realized that the moments of revelations are important than prolonged
experiences. And at a later stage he realized and also recognised that
everything is important in their own ways in the case of a photographer and his
job is to make images of his liking. This finding is very evident in the works
he has done based on the lives of the Portuguese people living still in Goa. He
confesses that it is the atmosphere of something from the past that makes their
houses and their lives different than the objects that he thought are making it
distinct. He says that the history of around five hundred years cannot be
separated from these Portuguese Goans as they still doubt whether India is
there country or not. For Prabuddha, this was not a problem at all as he too
was a person who lived beyond the borders defined by passports.
(work by Prabuddha)
Black and white was his preferred medium. And he said that
the black and white method helped him to turn his attention from the details to
the essential. Colours were for the outer world and he was the photographer of
the inner worlds. Yet Prabuddha said that he never detested the photographers
who used colour photography. He said it was like musicians using different musical
instruments and yet making the same music. There was a strange sense of rawness
in Prabuddha’s works, especially in the works done for advertising. He
categorically says that the advertising photography he saw in the days he
entered the scene was all about exalted moments. There was nothing real about
them. He wanted men and women who behaved naturally as if they were really
living ‘eating, singing, fucking and all’. He found the niche in the world of
advertisement for himself and easing into it was what he was supposed to do. And
he did it. Prabuddha was not a voracious image maker but whatever he made does make sense and it will remain so as they are aesthetically driven with a
compassionate eye behind each image.
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