Dawn breaks over the railway tracks slicing through a Calcutta slum. In the distance you hear the whistle of a local passenger train chugging sluggishly along.
Zoom in to a silhouette of a lean, lanky figure holding a Leica camera, gingerly treading the ground along the tracks, watching, waiting…. for the perfect moment.
He zeroes in on his subject: the piercing glare of a person we would perhaps not have given a second glance to otherwise – a ragpicker in his raw ruggedness.
He presses the shutter. In the ensuing silence after the train has left and before the cacophony of the day starts, you hear the click.
From 2017 to 2024, with the Pandemic in between, if you happened to spot a foreigner trudging along the slums and shanties in different parts of the city clicking photographs, it is very likely that you have seen French photographer, Alexandre de Mortemart. He has been training his camera in the Calcutta peripheries capturing unseen dimensions of life of the people here and the places they inhabit, endeavoring to depict a direction in what appears to us all ostensibly to be utter chaos.
He has been on the lookout for the symmetry inherent in the lines of ad hoc shanties constructed haphazardly out of ramshackle polyester sacks perhaps or the purposefulness in the eyes of the seemingly purposeless people pushed to the peripheries of life.
A selection of these black and white photographs have been compiled into a coffee table book, which de Mortemart has called “Mystical”….a title highlighting the inherent mystery lurking in every nook and cranny of the city of “Cal” as it were.
In town for the pre-launch of the tome, he talks to me about the journey of putting it together. “I have been in India long before I started photographing it,” he says. Working for a Paris based French company with interests in India, specifically Bengal, he was sent here for the discussions and negotiations. However, his eyes had wandered to what would appear to him to be a world that existed almost off the radar….right here, all around, but almost as though invisible. It was in the field of vision but unacknowledged and undiscovered.
“I could see Calcutta from a ‘photography’ point of view. And when I say that I mean in the traditional sense of where ‘photography’ came from….the lights, the shapes and what it is trying to convey. It has to have some sort of an idea, a message of sorts. It cannot be only fleeting, passings images without purpose. Hence the thing that struck me most were the people that you don’t see….especially in other parts of the world.”
Interestingly, however, the appeal of the book’s images is equally poignant for the people of Calcutta. We who are familiar with the ragpicker, the hijra, the beggar….them, whose lives flow along with us but as though in a parallel world, getting interconnected only at traffic intersections perhaps or on the pavements during morning walks when we almost step over them, sleeping, stirring, snoring, smiling, smirking as they catch glimpses of us. We never really make them the center of our field of vision. We avert our eyes and steps and invariably push them back in their places….to the peripheries.
When you flip through the pages of this book, you stare at them squarely and they stare right back at you. They glare. They smirk. They smile.
De Mortemart points out that the purpose of his visual narrative was to bring out the unity.
“You can see in the book that there is a kind of direction, a unity if I may say. Not so much of the little things in life which are fleeing and passing.” It is something permanent, poised to be photographed so that it remains forever.
Captured are a range of emotions, reflected in eyes, in the body languages, in the tilts of the head, in the motions of the hands. Captured is a little girl’s resolute walk towards an unknown destination, demonstrating her resistance to and resilience against the circumstances thrust upon her and her lot. We don’t know where she is going and we will never know. The photographer has only captured the determination.
He says, “In the years that I visited and revisited these areas I have gotten to know them and they have gotten to know me but only by face ….only visually. We never spoke or exchanged any words”. Part of the reason of course was the language barrier….his English or French to their Bengali or Hindi.
But the visual communication (what else is photography but that?) was powerful enough for de Mortemart to have long lasting, indelible even, memories that he can store for life.
They have become characters in the narrative of his own life. The music band player with his ill-fitting costume and oversized cap who beams at the photographer half to pose, half to demonstrate that he is a friend. The handsome young man sitting by the edge of a bed under an open sky, who is so engaged with the silent conversation with the photographer that he is startled when the reprimanding voice of a woman calls out to him, “Get over here right now”. De Mortemart chuckles recalling that moment. “I did not know whether it was his mother or his wife but the voice emanated from somewhere in the vicinity, not within the frame of this photo but it was a commanding tone and the subject of my photo promptly got up and left.” This photograph was clearly captured at the right time and right place. It won de Mortemart an international photography award. It is included in the book.
De Mortemart built up acquaintances amongst the hijra community too….photographing them as they pressed against car winds and knocked on the glass, clapping their hands, asking for money. He has witnessed the transformation of one of them from one gender to the other after an operation.
A theme of the book is the series we can call, the “face photos”. These capture those imaginary visages which we often spot in the unlikeliest of spaces. In formations of rain clouds or water stains on floors and in the case of de Mortemart, staring back at him from the makeshit walls of shanties constructed out of polythene sacks. Sometimes these smile, sometimes these smirk, sometimes these look sad and sorrowful. But they are an integral part of the unity that runs through the seemingly shattered, disoriented and disjointed lives in the slums.
Indeed, an underlying element in the photos is humour, which the visual narrative is generously sprinkled with. A tale of a tailor’s mannequin hanging outside the decrepit door of a dilapidated tailor shop is a case in point. De Mortemart has captured the doll’s transformation from a handsome young ‘Man’nequin to a guy dealing with physical and psychological issues….including an amputated foot, another amputated foot a year later and eventually a plastic surgeried torso. The doll went into hibernation (from depression?) for about a year. To the great delight of de Mortemart, he was resuscitated and revived. De Mortemart found that he had reappeared in the display hanger outside the door of the tailor’s shop albeit in a new avatar and with a makeover. Lovers of Hindi cinema might notice a slight resemblance of the mannequin in its first avatar to Amitabh Bachhan. The revived version, in keeping with the changing times, has an ever so tiny resemblance with Randeep Hooda, who had become a poster boy for sometime after his runaway success in movies like “Highway.” This observation is totally subjective of course.
Evening descends over the Hooghly River and along the banks the photographer catches other characters for his visual narrative. They travel seamlessly between the railway and the river.
The underlying theme of the visual narrative of the book is the strength that holds together the lives of the people who live on the verges, perennially in danger of falling apart. It is about the resilience that refuses to cave into the cold callousness of the human condition. A photo of a poster pasted on a wall in a ghetto captures the enduring smile of Bengali film icon Uttam Kumar….the eyes, crinkled in glee reflect the unseen happiness depicted in the beaming smile but the middle is entirely missing, ripped out.
The book will be globally released in September/ October.
De Mortemart’s is analogue photography. He is often asked the question, “Why?”. In this day and age of digital photography, when camera phones have turned photography into an everyman and everywoman’s passion, if not profession, he has deliberately decided on using a camera which requires the use of rolls of film. It is also phenomenally expensive. “Every time you press the shutter, it costs (Rs 100….about 1 Euro),” he says. Unlike the trigger-happy common individual of today whose hobby sees hundreds if not thousands of “clicks” per day, Alexandre has to carefully deliberate each frame before he presses the shutter.
The process of production, which incidentally is taking place partly in France and partly in Germany, using the globally acclaimed German technology, is costly and time-consuming. But in order to ensure that the quality of the photographs is the best in the world, de Mortemart is not going to settle for anything less. Indeed, asking him “why?” he prefers to use an analogue camera over a digital one is like asking grandmother why she prefers to grind her spices using the good old mortar and pestle over the blender or mixer for that matter.
Because it is custom made, not mass produced. Because the touch of “tender loving care” brings out the authentic flavour. In the case of De Mortemart it is literally the difference between the real and the reel.
Though in the case of Alexandre de Mortemart, the reel is all real.
In his foreword, “Sublime Chaos” renowned French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, who has written the text for the book, observes, “Alexandre de Mortemart offers us here a Calcutta sans colour, that is to say, free of bigotry and uninspiring picturesqueness. He suppresses from his photographs everything that relates to spectacle or stereotypical characters.”
Published by Trans Photographic Press this year, according to Rima Sen, Alexandre’s wife, a Bengali, “Though the photos are set in Calcutta, it is a truly global book.”
The film for the photographs, bought in France is brought to India and exposed in Calcutta. Back in Paris, there is a process of developing the film which entails creating a contact sheet. From this the photos to finally be processed are selected.
In the next phase of printing the book will be in Germany.
“German technology is world class,” says Rima Sen. “We are aiming for the best possible quality.”
She says that the texture of the paper is to watch out for.
Indeed the book is impressive not just visually but also as far the tactile experience is concerned.
The writer is Editor, Features