My introduction to S Paul, who passed away last week, goes back to November 1993 when he had a solo show at Max Mueller Bhavan in New Delhi. In less than 15 photographs you could see a black and white representation of images that held within the power of suggestion in the reflection of moments. Here were images that were alive in a quiet way, and held the truth that a photograph must have an existence of its own.
In those days, I used to write for the Saturday page of a leading daily and Paul was given almost an entire page. A fortnight later, he left a small note for me with the editor. On a slip of paper he had written: “Thank you for giving a mirror to my work. Bahut behetereen khyal, sundar lekh!!”
I had just returned from America and seen a few prints by Edward Steichen, I felt Paul had an uncanny affinity with the works of Steichen. Paul’s works were about the past and the present, he shot at a time when the currents and artistic sensibilities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were slowly being revamped, notably from pictorialism. Paul had a subtle sensibility, an eye, an openness to ideas and experiences, perhaps a need, and certainly a longing to go beyond the superficial. He worked on the idea that evolution happens not by random chance. And opportunities had to be made use of by being open, by searching and questioning and wandering.
In Paul’s works, there was a photography of thought, and a subtle yet perceptible modernist current. To look at images by Paul was to be introduced to the first expression of true photographic art. While his images were like short stories, they were also full of poetry, and they seemed to announce the principles of objective photography, frank and forthright photography.
Paul belonged to the golden age of photojournalism where there was no Photoshop and no political dilemmas about the standardisation of information through images. Paul respected the camera for its role as a transmitter of truth. That is what Paul stood for, his lens was an instrument that captured the truth.
His work embodied an honesty in which there was no retouching, no synthetic images, no tweaking. Everything he shot and gave the world was authentic, raw, and pure and the worth of his frame was ‘the weight of the photos’, or the justification of what surrounds him as it was.
But Paul was a passionate lensman. He breathed photography in the dusty bylanes of Delhi. He shot for himself, for savouring the moments and enjoying his own joie de vivre. To the world of photography in India he was a true modernist. The sanctity of his work was spoken upon by Amit Mehra when he published his book on Kashmir. Mehra said, “Everything I learnt about photography I learnt from S Paul Sir. He gave me a masterclass in everything that photography stood for. Today when I get assignments from foreign newspapers and media I know I owe it to my guru Paul Sir.”
Some of Paul’s greatest images came from his early days in Shimla. His pictures had a rare and unique sensitivity that made you stop and stare at his subjects. The commonplace simplicity and the impeccable timing made you think about the power of that split second. Whether he shot the head of a little monk, or a riverside or even a pair of old men on a chair, the human elements in his pictorial frame belonged to the naturality and limpid languidness of the moment.
One of his most perennial images is that of a dove in flight. The timing of the image is emblematic of the absolute purity of nature. Paul’s works are a sublime procession of natural and animal forms, sometimes naïve, sometimes vulnerable, with shy, furtive movements, flying with their wings mysteriously into the air or assuming attitudes commonplace enough, but imbued with some mystic meaning, with the light concentrated upon their wings. Can you explain the melancholic beauty of the falling rain, or tell why the slushy pavements, reflecting the lights of a lamp post remind us of the golden dreams the poets dream of ? Paul’s works tell us that one does not create in oblivion. Photography is about hunting for subjects, reinventing subject matter in how to take a picture. This is what S Paul gave to the world of photojournalism and photography in India. Rest in peace Sir.