In the Landscape of Nudes
I would love to say that I first fell in love with Prabuddha when I saw Ladakh through his eyes. But no, the truth is that it was his nudes my blood first met. And what photographs they were! Not in-the-face, not straight-up erotic, no, his photographs were strange and mysterious messages written through the naked body. There were stories his photographs told - even the ones which he clicked for advertisements or as commercial ventures - which made me gaze at them with unabashed fascination and unease. There was something inside me which felt challenged, which wanted an artistic side of me to react but from an atavistic core.
I delved deeper into the world of this photographer whose work was unlike anything I’d ever seen. And that’s when I unravelled the mind, artistry and eye of a completely unconventional maestro.
A man who had started his career as a copywriter, and became a photographer perchance, broke several social taboos when he first released a book of nudes in 1996, called Women. Possibly that landmark remains singular in Indian photography till date. But this was just the start of his iconoclasm. His fashion photography was sensual and full of tales - and so personal that it became instantly identifiable. Though most in love with black-&-white, the colours in Prabuddha’s work, when used, were soaked with shades which came with their own personalities.
His motto was forever “Do not stick to a comfort zone. Comfort is the greatest enemy of an artist.” His next book Ladakh was something so incredible that it placed him immediately in the echelons of the finest photographers of the country. That barren sparse land has never looked so bare and full at the same time, so completely frightening and spiritual simultaneously. Ladakh got defined through his images for people who had never visited it, and remains so even today.
Prabuddha was born to artistic parents, Kamala and Prodosh. His father was the director in NGMA, New Delhi for long years, and it is not inconceivable that his artistic inclinations were first honed in the tony and beautiful galleries of NGMA. As Somak Ghoshal wrote “It was perhaps his love for Amrita Sher-Gil’s striking portraits of dusky women that translated into his obsession with women’s bodies as a photographer.” And seeing the paintings of maestros on a daily basis surely gave him his “sense of composition, voice and narrative destiny”.
Prabuddha’s next book Edge of Faith was a collection of portraits of the Catholic Community in Goa, and was suffused with the loneliness, desolation but hardiness of the people there. But more than anything else it was his book Longing which combined all the elements of his search and destinations. Simultaneously sensuous, haunting, questioning, remembering, it is like a personal journal and journey which Prabuddha put together. It is specific as a fact, hazy as a memory and yielding as a dream.
I finally got to meet Prabuddha and hear him personally in March 2011, when he held a workshop (of sorts) in Calcutta. And as expected, he spoke little of the techniques of photography and more of the artistic life and the heart of a human. He was concerned more with living life as an art form rather than the techniques of his craft.
I had scribbled some of his random thoughts then. And I share them here as a tribute to one of the finest artistes I have ever known -
Keep evolving in your art as you evolve as a person
Find yourself in each photograph
Make mistakes. There is no problem.
Always come back to the purity of why you started taking photographs
You need to first articulate what is inside you - and not say things like "I'm gonna make a book out of this, etc"
The challenge of nude photography does not lie with me, it lies with the woman who is baring herself, laying herself totally vulnerable in front of me.
When I take nude photographs, there is sexual tension. And it is important that that is there, because that effect is important for the photograph.
We were far more honest about our bodies, our sexuality, years ago. After getting influenced with the prudery of the Britishers, we have become hypocrites. We hide our real feelings behind veils of pretence. And we suffer for it.
I am a lonely person. There is a desolation inside me. I don't know why, I don't know where it comes from. But my most personal work reflects that again and again.
You can make out a man's character from his art.
I am not a maestro. I am just a person in front of you, having a conversation with you. Hope we learn from each other.
Prabuddha died a year later, in 2012. I often remember him on the stage, with his long hair strewn, his eyes wild and his long fingers marking the air with something which seemed to float on. I often open the net and gaze at his photographs - the ones which marked my years - and made me know that art was really nothing but a journey of finding oneself.
Some works of Prabuddha Dasgupta:
from Ladakh -
from Women -
from Edge of Faith -
from Longing -
Note - All images are sourced from the internet. They are used here for representation purposes, with no commercial considerations.
Other resources if you want to know more about Prabuddha, his life and his work -
Somehow, talking of the memory of Prabuddha, this poem seemed so appropriate.