Let’s start from where our worlds meet- theatre photography. How did that happen and why does it fascinate you?
I started off at the Prithvi Festival in 1995. It was my favourite. Maybe because it was my first one, and I did do a couple more festivals after that, but that is my favourite.
I loved photographing before and after the show. The performance itself never excited me so much. I mean, its ok. What you do is you find moments you think will be photographic. But before the show the actors have a lot of energy. The way the director interacts with them giving them instructions. The woman carrying a chipped mug everywhere and her aunt’s photograph. And you don’t intrude. You hang around and watch. And I love that.
Is there a degree of honesty that comes with being backstage and not on the stage performing?
Yes there is honesty and a certain energy. Footsbarn, they’d be joking and fooling around. All the girls would go shopping. You saw them as people and what they brought to stage. And I was thoroughly entertained.
I was working with a newspaper at the time. I’d have nightmares, you know,because of my morning shift in the paper. I’d dream that I had missed the bus, and then I’d wake up in the middle of the night. After my shift, I’d return with my negatives to the dark room and see how they had turned out.
And then all these poor theatre people would keep asking me to come and shoot their pictures, their troupes, their shows. Free fund photography! But it was fun. And the thing is – just watching Habib Tanveer saab interact with his troupe, the legend. You also feel the politics and watch it. And we would get to know them, enter their world, but briefly. You don’t have to spend too much time with them.
I’m curious to know about your relationship with the old film medium and how it has changed with the world of digital technology.
Till 2001, I was shooting on film. In 2002, my son was born, and so my photography got a bit reduced. People stop calling you because they think ‘Oh, she won’t work because she is pregnant’! By the time I came back into the world, the real world, I felt like Rip Van Winkle. I had woken up and the world had changed. Suddenly it was all about megapixels. Camera bodies had changed, suddenly it was all digital 7 or 8 MP Nikon cameras. It was no fun. As it is, I had shifted from 35 mm to 120 mm. 35 mm was the Nikon and Cannons with rectangular frames. Then I shifted to Hasselblad and it was a square frame. I has always wanted a lens with which I could be close to them and get some more information about the background. The square frame allowed that. Suddenly I felt I could breathe. With all my savings I got the Hasselblad 501CM. It was fucking expensive, it still is! I couldn’t afford the digital one. I still can’t. It was 4 lakhs, 8 lakhs something like that. Never had any spare money. The joy of it went.
I was spoilt with film. You were the boss. The subject had to trust you completely. You worked together- with being concerned about how the image was going to be but without any gaps in the middle of the shoot where someone is saying I don’t kow what this looks like. There were, of course, subjects who were nervous about what it would look like. Now when you shoot, it is about shooting and checking and shooting and checking and I feel that in some way the rhythm of the shoot gets disturbed. You keep interrupting your thought process. It is like constantly doing a spell check while writing. When you write you go with the flow and do a spell check later. Of course to some extent it helps because you realize what else you can try. But I liked waiting to see when the film was processed, what I had done. I had a certain feeling to it. Any time you wanted to take a gap, you took a gap because you were loading and rolling the film onto the camera. I just enjoyed it much more. Though I do shoot a lot on my phone, I’m an instagram addict. I take as many pictures now as I did in my newspaper days which I had reduced in between because you don’t have to worry about film, lab costs- it was all taken care of. You could get any amount of film at any temperature you wanted. Earlier when I was shooting Rajat’s [Rajat Kapoor] film, I couldn’t get a tungsten balance film, I could only get it in one particular ASA. So you were really handicapped by the kind of stock that was available. Your lab is now your computer- you don’t even need to go to a lab. Lot of printing people lost jobs, labs shut down. I miss it, making the print, saying I can dodge this, make this darker, the feeling of making the print is gone, I miss that. It’s not like I’m against technology or anything like that, but the charm is gone.
What is nice for digital is this. In the 90s, we thought images. We thought visually. Now with instagram and the phone camera, everyone thinks visually. And that is so lovely. You see all kinds of images coming in, its gone beyond technology. Earlier you would be like the frame is sacrosanct, this is the image shot directly, this is the exposure. Now it is beyond that. It has become an art. It is not how good the painter’s skills are, but what you are trying to say. The message becomes more important than the technique. And that I like. That is one thing I really like My daughter and my son take photographs. My son is 11 and he shoots movies. My daughter is 17 and has been shooting for 3 years! I started shooting at 21 and even then, I had to borrow lenses from other photographers on the field because I couldn’t afford to buy them. Now it is so accessible. It is not an elite medium anymore, everyone can shoot pictures.
http://www.instagram.com/eenal
Can you tell us about some of your inspirations? Books, films, people….
Thrillers, always! I am a thriller addict. I need a book everyday to read. This film noir excites me. Any thrillers, but Raymond Chandler is one person I love. I look up to Richard Avedon. I saw this issue of the Egoiste, which gave me goosebumps. Avedon had shot four features for the magazine, but each feature was so different from the other. It was a master at work. The ease with which the images were shot! There was nothing forced about any of the images. From a photojournalist style to portraiture, to two others I don’t remember now. I was so in awe of this person who could treat this medium so flexibly. He was so comfortable with it. That is what you aspire for in the medium that you work in- being free of everything and expressing naturally and effortlessly, that you think ‘what’s the big deal’. So, yes, Raymond Chandler and Avedon and all the Pulp fiction writers. In fact, I don’t even know the writers normally. I just read the first paragraph of a book in a bookstore, and if I like it, I pick it up. It’s great, the pacing that happens. Some cinematographers like Tassaduq [Hussain]. The way he shot Omkara was nice because he used shadows nicely.
In conversation with Shruthi Vishwanath.
More of Meenal’s gorgeous photographs:
junoontheatre.wordpress.com 