Nemai Ghosh has been capturing well-known Indian artists at work for years now. But his favourite time was spent with Satyajit Ray, he tells Sayandeb Chowdhury

It was in late 1967 or early 1968. Nemai Ghosh was deeply involved in theatre. He was also an observer of endless card playing sessions at his south Kolkata apartment. Ghosh was not a photographer by any stretch of imagination.

Then one day, purely by chance, he acquired a fixed-lens QL 17 Canonette. And it came in useful — his friend actor Robi Ghosh was shooting for a new film and Nemai accompanied him, armed with his new camera, to a village outside Santiniketan.

But Ghosh found the film’s director a more thrilling subject than the surroundings, the sets or the cast. The tall, dark, intelligent-looking man was engrossed in what he was doing; Ghosh captured his movements, his monologues and his habits. He was no stranger; Satyajit Ray was already an acknowledged master of his craft, but he was too well-known to be a willing subject for a photographer.

Ghosh made it a point not to interfere at all in the shooting process and took all his pictures without using a flash. “I did not get to speak to him at all. Only later did someone show him my pictures of the first few days,” Ghosh remembers clearly. And how did Ray react? “He looked closely at them”.

When he knew it was me who had taken them, he turned to me and said, ‘What have you done! You have stolen my angles. Don’t waste any time, just keep shooting’.”

These few words were enough stimulus for Ghosh. “I went back to my Canonette and never came out of it,” he says, chuckling.

This is how Ghosh became Ray’s personal photographer; in fact, the director called the photographer his very own ‘Boswell’ (James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson), who used his camera instead of his pen to record, tenderly, each moment of his life. Since that day, until the filmmaker passed away in 1992, Ghosh went everywhere that Ray did.

And because of his flash-free, non-intrusive style, Ray allowed him access even into private moments. “I could be at his place any time and not once did he feel intruded upon. He was a rewarding subject.” The association produced 90,000 pictures and several books, including the acclaimed Satyajit Ray at 70 and Satyajit Ray: A Vision of Cinema.

But Ghosh visited Ray without his camera when the director died. “I could not shoot that day. I always captured him at work or in thought. Death was a pause. A pause forever. I was devastated.” The association with Ray brought Ghosh close to other greats of the time.

He remembers his meeting with Henri Cartier-Bresson in the latter’s Paris home and photographing Michelangelo Antonioni and his wife Erica in romantic solitude in Kolkata.

Long after Ray’s death Ghosh turned his camera towards other subjects. And his big project now is to photograph the great masters of Indian art at work. In his new book, Faces of Indian Art: Through the Lens of Nemai Ghosh, published by Art Alive Gallery and launched last week in Mumbai, the photographer has captured almost every living master of the Indian art world.

There will be two more volumes — works in progress — that will include younger artists and painters. “The idea came to me when I accompanied Ray to shoot his documentary Inner Eye on Benodebihari Mukherjee,” says Ghosh. “Mukherjee was blind; yet how beautifully he understood the use of colour! I thought to myself, why not I capture this great artist at work?”

The experiment grew and took wing. The artists Ghosh wanted as subjects were very forthcoming. “MF Husain even came on a surprise visit to Kolkata to help me shoot him while painting.”

The artists agreed to let Ghosh into their private working moments because of the same reason that Ray did: “I never intrude or invade their space. I make my presence almost invisible and shoot in natural light. So they do their work and I do mine. Also, I am essentially a theatre person and I can preempt a person’s body movements. So I wait for that moment and usually get it.”