At about the same time that India gained Independence in 1947, a young Indian boy, settled miles away in Nairobi, East Africa, had begun envisioning his own journey. Jitendra Arya, already a photographer of reckoning at the age of 15, with photos of important public figures like (former Kenyan Prime Minister and President), Jomo Kenyatta already under his belt, had an inkling of his true calling by then. “A man must follow his avocation” believed (Jitendra’s) father, who supported his son’s nascent dream with deep conviction; one that sidelined all discouragement from the business community his family belonged to. A year later in 1948, Arya set off for London, the then centre of print and publishing media, to pursue his dream of becoming a professional photographer.
Building a legacy
Soon after arriving in the city, a shy Arya started working at a local darkroom for a while but it wasn’t until he met Hungarian-British photojournalist Michael Peto, that his vision began to take real shape. Accompanying Peto to shoot a documentary on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in 1951, Arya got his first front page credit with images of India’s first Prime Minister splashed across the Sunday Times. From that point on, his professional graph as a photographer of national and international acclaim only soared.
Clark Gable and Ava Gardener on the sets of Mogambo (John Ford) East Africa, December 1952. | Photo Credit: The Jitendra Arya Foundation
He initially set up his own home studio in Chiswick that later became the more formal, Arya Studio on Kensington High Street. He went on to shoot well-known public personalities from diverse fields of politics, the art world and the movies among others, both in the UK first and later in India as well.
The exhibition that opens at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) the following weekend, is an attempt to bring to light an archive, that spans about 60 years of this profilic artist’s oeuvre. The retrospective, is aptly titled, Light Works, owing to Arya’s reverence and understanding of light. The show is put together by Arya’s family, with curatorial guidance by Sabeena Gadihoke, who earlier worked on a similar project of photographer Homai Vyarawalla’s work, at the same venue in 2011. Gadihoke first met Arya in 2010, while working on a dissertation on photography and print culture in the 1950s and 1960s. “My first exposure to the archive had convinced me that this should be a big retrospective,” she reminisces over an email exchange. “When I asked him if I could take clicks of his photographs, he seemed almost eager that I do it. I spent about two-three days in his sea-facing apartment in Colaba frenetically taking photographs. All this while JA (Jitendra Arya) sat on the swing in the living area watching me. He would go away for an afternoon nap and then return again to do the same. Now when I think about it, it was as if he was handing over this legacy to someone else.”
Jitendra Arya and Dev Anand on the location shoot of Manzil, Simla 1959. | Photo Credit: The Jitendra Arya Foundation
Sifting through history
Kavi, Arya’s son, who was actively involved in redeeming these negatives stowed away in “almaris and drawers” is still visibly amazed as he says, “I knew there’s stuff — but not how much!”. One sweep for low resolution scanning of Arya’s meticulously indexed and labelled stockpile threw up 7,000 negatives. Gadihoke echoes Kavi’s rigourous routine of scanning and retouching the images. Since both Gadihoke and Kavi (who is a Professor at IIT-Bombay) had full-time jobs, they dedicated time to sift through the trove during vacations or time off, eventually taking three whole years to glean about 300 odd final images for the show. “We digitised and digitised and digitised. That is the only way with an archive of this volume. Every trip would be spent opening up envelopes and negatives,” explains Gadihoke in more detail. Furthermore, notes that Arya often made for himself helped distill interesting stories from the work. Notebooks that he maintained had, as Chhaya Arya, who assisted her husband often, recalled, “dates of all the sittings”, in other words, written recordings of each shoot, complete with details of the subject being photographed, the camera being used, often noting camera settings even.
Maqbool Fida Hussain for a photo feature titled 'Artists at work' in the 'Illustrated Weekly of India', 1963 | Photo Credit: The Jitendra Arya Foundation
The home that the Aryas settled into, after their move to India in 1961, when Arya started work as special photographer with The Times of India, was something he zeroed in on because of the “flood of light from the sea”, states Chhaya. The light played a key role in a lot of shoots that Arya would carry out within this home space, that doubled up as his studio, where he worked with “crude contraptions” like old sarees and Kashmir screens to bring in lighting effects. Arya wasn’t a photographer who believed in the use of flash lights, preferring to use available light and reflectors. Most of his savings were spent on buying camera equipment, a fact to which Chhaya often commented in jest, complaining, “How about buying me diamonds instead?”, to which Arya’s witty Punjabi response was that she didn’t need diamonds, when she had two “diamond varge puttar (two diamond-like sons).”
Pandit Ravi Shankar studio portrait in Chiswick, London, 1955 | Photo Credit: The Jitendra Arya Foundation
Marching to his own beat
Arya to the world might have been a star photographer, who photographed and befriended the who’s who of celebrated industries, but to Kavi, who recalls him as an “anti-thesis to the typical artist”, he was also “just dad, a Bohemian dad”, nonetheless, whose “priorities were always in the right place.” Although Kavi never pursued photography as a career, his father’s fine pecularities of shooting, like back-lighting the hair of the subject, hence separating it from the background or shooting at the right angles to make the most of the golden ratios across a person’s face, are all values of inheritance. “Don’t take landscapes, go in and be bold,” were Arya’s first words of advice to his son on shooting. Something that he said, “Keep yourself lightweight, simple. Concentrate on getting the right shot at the right time”, is also true of his own style of work.
What distinguishes Arya’s images is not really that he shot with fancy Linhoffs and Hasselblads, but rather his ability to “capture the moment”, “…an immortal moment that captures its essence”, as Chhaya describes it best.
Light works opens at the NGMA, Fort on September 1 till October 8; for details on walkthroughs and talks, see facebook.com/jitendra.arya.photos