Photographers borrowed their verbs from the hunt. They shoot a picture, or take one, and speak afterwards of having caught the moment. Susan Sontag heard a trigger in the shutter and believed that to photograph a person was, in some small measure, to violate them. Kushal Ray has spent more than forty years working on the far side of that argument. His subjects let him in. He goes back to them, and back again, until the camera is no longer an event in the room.
Ray came to the camera sideways. Born in Calcutta in 1960, he joined The Telegraph as a sports reporter in 1982 and found photography on assignment, in the photo essays he made for the paper. He had trained as a painter. He schooled himself on Atget, Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, and when Lee Friedlander told him to settle on one lens, he settled on one. In 1991 he left the newspaper to photograph full time. He worked on borrowed film and rationed his developer, and that year he exhibited more than 260 rolls.
This is photography practised as a form of attendance. Ray accepts the terms that closeness sets, the waiting and the long afternoons in which nothing happens, and he is still there when something does. The pictures that come of it are acts of feeling. The photographer stands inside them, implicated and answerable, and you can sense the years it took before he was allowed to stand there.
The three bodies of work here were all made by returning. Ray first went to Ladakh in 1987 and went back for thirty years, at a cost he could seldom afford. He stayed with families there and kept visiting the same households while their children grew up and had children of their own. His first solo exhibition, in Mumbai in 1998, came out of those journeys, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi acquired one of its photographs.
In the early 1990s he walked Calcutta every day, back to the same tram stops and river ghats. He printed almost none of what he shot. The negatives stayed in their sleeves for more than thirty years, until a first selection went on view at Emami Art, Kolkata, earlier this year. In 1998 he began photographing a joint family in an old Calcutta house, and he did not stop for over a decade. Some eight thousand photographs came out of that house. They became Intimacies, the most personal of his projects and the one in which the photographer himself keeps appearing.
Calcutta took to the camera early and has never quite put it down. Its studios and amateur societies kept a working photographic culture going over generations, and Ray belongs to that inheritance. He has added to it as well. Younger photographers learned the trade beside him, on walks and in workshops, and several of them come back again and again to work on his projects. For a photographer of his seriousness, Ray has been seen too seldom outside Bengal, and Delhi has never had this much of his work in one place. The occasion is overdue. He is still at work, with several projects open, among them a long engagement with the Chinese community of Kolkata. What hangs here is a part of what he has made, chosen because each of these projects is whole. It is enough to show the temperament behind the camera, patient and a little obstinate, prepared to wait years for the right to stand in a doorway.
Intimacies, 1998-2009
Ten people lived in the house when Kushal Ray first brought a camera into it in 1998. The house was ninety years old and had twelve rooms, and four generations of one Calcutta family moved through them. Ray was already a friend of the household. He set up a makeshift studio in Manju's room, and over the next decade he made some eight thousand photographs there. He photographed Manju on her way to college in a taxi, and at home marking B.A. answer scripts. He photographed her mother, Muni, being fed by her great-granddaughter Teesta. When Muni's last illness came he stayed, and he photographed that as well, and the journey that followed. In one picture his own hand rests on Manju's. The title says it is there to signify togetherness, which is a plain way of putting something that is hard to put plainly. Ray has said that he loved the people in this house without reservation and that they returned it in full. The pictures bear him out. Very little in them looks arranged for a visitor. Intimacies was published by Niyogi Books in 2012 with an essay by Kunal Basu, and Dayanita Singh nominated it that year for the photobook award at Le Bal in Paris. Mandas Publications later brought out a second edition. The forty-four prints here are the full exhibition set, hung together as one household.
Ladakh: A Syncretic Living, 1987-2017
Dolma's father, Tashi Namgail, ran a modest guest house in Leh for travellers who did not have much money. He kept donkeys to haul cans of drinking water, and he played the damyan, a Ladakhi string instrument. Kushal Ray photographed him with the donkeys in 1994. That same year he photographed Dolma's mother, Stanzin Zangmo, with her granddaughter Spalzin, who is a schoolteacher now. He went on photographing the family for more than twenty years. Dolma appears in the kitchen of the ancestral house, and later with her grandsons in a new one. Tashi and Stanzin had both died by the time the series closed. Ray first went to Ladakh in 1987 and kept returning for thirty years. He travelled on very little and stayed with families. The Ladakh he photographed is an inhabited place, where Buddhist and Muslim women gather at the same polo ground in Leh and children wait for the school bus in the Nubra Valley. A restaurant that a woman opened in the early eighties belongs to her son now. Three large prints give the land its full scale. The rest of the series belongs to the people who live on it. His first solo exhibition, in 1998, was drawn from this work. He called it Everyday Life of an Exotic Land, a title that argues with itself. Photographers had been coming to these mountains for generations in search of the exotic. Ray kept coming back until it had worn off and only the everyday was left.
