NOSTALGIA

Dhiraj Chawda, ace glamour photographer for over forty years, describes himself as an artist who paints with his camera. He is best known for his portraits of film stars, and is remembered for his meticulous attention to detail, his penchant for experimentation, and his ability to create an ethereal aura around his subjects. A walk down memory lane with a man who is an inspiration to photographers even today

Dhiraj Chawda, distinguished glamour photographer, has a story to tell. When Hollywood superstar Greta Garbo was a newcomer to films she was signed on as a contract artiste by MGM, as a favour to someone. She was put on a weekly salary and forgotten about. It never occurred to anybody to cast her in even a small role. One day when she was in New York, a young photographer came up to her and asked whether he could take her pictures. She agreed, and he managed to put her black and white photograph on the cover of a magazine. And all of New York was agog to find out who this mysterious beauty was. When the agents at MGM saw the magazine they sent an SOS to their people in New York to grab her for a movie contract before anybody else did. Only then did they realise that Greta Garbo was already an MGM employee. And that’s how she got her big break in films. “It was a single picture which did it!” says Dhiraj Chawda, solemnly.

“People don’t realise the power of a good photograph these days,” sighs the veteran. “They rush through photo sessions without giving any importance to them.” As we sit in his apartment at Churchgate he pulls out a film magazine to illustrate his point, drawing your attention to photo features of various heroines. “Look at this... if she has such a good figure this is not the way to make the most of it... look at this section of the photograph... complete confusion... this picture emphasises the gap in her teeth... the most important thing is to give a rounded effect to the subject, but this one is completely flat...” He should know. Dhiraj Chawda has a rare collection of photographs from the pages of film and cultural history. It is a rich repertoire built up by the photographer over the last 40 years or so. He is perhaps best known for his portraits of film stars, imaginative studies that create an aura, a halo, around stars like Prithviraj Kapoor and Nargis, as well as music maestros such as Khan Saheb Bismillah Khan. His photographs launched the careers of stars like Tina Munim and Kamal Haasan, and bolstered the early careers of superstars like Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan.

“When I photographed Prithviraj Kapoor for the first time, for the cover of Filmfare, I didn’t receive any feedback from him. Then I happened to meet him at the airport, and I went and asked him whether he had liked the pictures. He said, “The man in the photographs is much better than the real man. You have not only done justice to me, but you have magnified all my good points!” remembers Chawda, fondly.

Dhiraj Chawda started his long association with photography at an early age. But even before he picked up a camera, he had displayed a talent for painting and an innate love for art. “I used to sketch, sculpt and do watercolour painting as a youngster,” says Chawda, “And my work must have been good because my art teacher in school suggested that I go to Shantiniketan to study art under Nand Lal Bose, one of the greatest watercolour painters. My teacher even sent a couple of my paintings to Shantiniketan with his recommendation and Bose sent a message back saying that I was welcome to join him there. But my father didn’t like the idea. He told me, “Why do you want to become an artist? In India there is no appreciation for such things and you cannot make a living from art.” So I didn’t go to Shantiniketan. It so happened that shortly after this I fell ill with malaria. To cheer me up my father bought me a Kodak Brownie camera. I still remember my excitement when I saw that plastic body. It cost four rupees and seventy-five paise in those days. I started taking pictures of family members, and I was hooked!”

Chawda firmly believes that, though technique can be taught, it is important to have an artistic inclination from within. “When you have the artistic instinct you know exactly what to click,” he continues, “To be able to see pictures is an art, a gift. I remember Sharmila Tagore requested me to buy her a fully automatic camera. When I brought it to her, she asked me to tell her what subjects she should photograph. I said, “In that case, you don’t need a camera. If you don’t know what you want to use it for, you might as well use it as a paper weight.”

After experimenting with his Brownie camera, Chawda went on to buy more expensive equipment, as his fascination with the medium grew. He fondly remembers the time he bought his first video camera, a Roliflex, in 1947 when he was in New York on family business. Unlike the equipment he had been using so far, the Roliflex was a serious instrument for professionals. Since Chawda was so interested in art and photography, his father allowed him to go to the famous Italian film studio, Cinnecitta, Italy, to study cinematography. Having competed a year at Cinnecitta as an observer, Chawda returned home, all set to make a career in cinematography. But to his dismay, he found that no-one was willing to give him a chance as a cinematographer.

“I didn’t become serious about photography till my pictures were first published in The Illustrated Weekly”, he remembers, “But the real turning point in my career came because I happened to be working as an assistant to director Jayant Desai. I used to take photographs for him once in a while when he was shooting with Premnath and Bina Rai. They all liked my pictures very much, and that encouraged me to click some pictures of Chand Usmani, who was also a newcomer at the time. I took some triple exposure pictures of her. And that hit the jackpot!” he exclaims, laughing. After that, there was no looking back. The film industry immediately sat up and took notice of Chawda, and it didn’t take long for his work to catch on. After Chand Usmani other heroines started coming forward wanting similar pictures of themselves. Chand Usmani also got a lot of mileage and contracts because of those triple exposure pictures. Chawda went on to use her photographs on calendars too, in various costumes, and this also helped her to land roles.

“I think I took Chand Usmani’s pictures in 1956,” says Chawda, trying to recollect, “Because in 1958 there was an article in The Illustrated Weekly featuring me as one of the ten most popular and successful colour photographers in India. So by 1958 I was well known enough.”

The distinguishing mark of Dhiraj Chawda’s work is the sense of intimacy and dialogue created between photographer and subject. Says Chawda, “To do a good session you have to do a little homework, prepare for it. Personally I need to get to know my subject before photographing them. Or at least know a little about them.” The photographer’s presence in each portrait is manifest — sometimes unobtrusively, as in the portrait of Pt. Ravi Shanker lost in his music, sometimes self-consciously, such as the studio portraits of Rekha, and sometimes in a participatory manner, like the one of a jovial Randhir Kapoor, spanning the breadth of the frame with his arms, and offering mugs of beer to the camera.

It is evident that the special aura created in Chawda’s photographs is born out of an understanding of the subject, drawing upon and adding to already prevalent public images. Thus his portraits of Meena Kumari and Nargis emphasise an ethereal beauty in soft focus, Rekha is presented in a bright, brash frontal portrait, and flautist Pt. Raghunath Seth is surrounded by a whirl of colour, achieved by using effect prisms, emphasising the movement and fluidity of music.

Chawda’s portraits can be described essentially as ‘glamour’ photography, as opposed to ‘fashion’ photography, for every actor or actress is approached as a star, put on a pedestal, scrutinised through the lens and presented as remote and aloof. Says Gautam Rajadhyaksha about Chawda’s subjects, “His stars were made to look like stars. Nowadays, stars themselves do not present themselves as stars, but as casual, contemporary people. In those days stars were another breed, they were unknown and entrancing commodities."

In fact, Chawda says he can make anyone look like a star because there is at least one angle to every face which can be emphasised to this effect, especially with the use of a soft filter. “I call this the star filter,” he smiles, “and even when the face is not made up, this is the ‘make-up filter’, blending and diminishing all blemishes.”

Despite his ‘star filter’, though, Chawda insists that if a person does not possess a basic beauty or good features, he doesn’t even attempt to photograph them. “It would be a waste of my efforts and my technology. I can enhance a face by 30 or 40 per cent by selecting good angles and lighting but that’s about all.” So which heroine, in his experience, made for a perfect picture? “There were quite a few who had a God-given grace and charm about them,” he says. “Waheeda Rehman and Nutan were two of the most ideal faces to photograph. One could shoot them endlessly, untiringly. And in terms of enthusiasm, Sharmila Tagore and Saira Banu were terrific. They would always bring lots of suitcases with them, full of various clothes. It was also a great pleasure shooting Sandhya Roy and also Suchitra Sen, who was a real beauty. I did a shoot with Suchitra for Lux.”

Following his success with Chand Usmani’s triple exposure prints, Chawda continued to use this technique to great effect for a number of stars. In his use of multiple images and sense of intimacy with his subjects, the work of Dhiraj Chawda is reminiscent pf the photography of Cecil Beaton, glamour photographer of the 1950s. Notably, a 1980 portrait of Parveen Babi wearing a white netted veil against an ice-blue backdrop, is reminiscent of Beaton’s photographs of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. Admitting to having drawn inspiration from Cecil Beaton as well as the legendary Yusuf Karsh, Chawda comments, “When you look at a picture and say ‘wow’, the picture is a success. Every picture of Beaton’s was a ‘wow’.”

“There is so much to say that I cannot always say it in a single picture,” continues Chawda, explaining his frequent use of multiple images. “By using this technique I can create several moods in one picture — the art is in finding the right placement of the images to create the mood. Take, for example, the montage of Nutan’s pictures which I took just three and a half hours to do. She had just got married and won the Filmfare award for Sujata. The montage presented her as a housewife, a college girl and a bride. When she saw it she was delighted and told me, “With these pictures my great-grandchildren will remember me as a versatile actress!”

Chawda lays a heavy emphasis on experimentation. And just as his early experiment with Chand Usmani hit the jackpot, several of his subsequent experiments have turned out to be big successes as well. Perhaps the most famous of them all was the experiment he tried on Raj Kapoor during the making of Mera Naam Joker. “That picture was eventually used on the music album cover of Mera Naam Joker and on the cover of Filmfare,” says Chawda. “I used the same technique on Kamal Haasan later. I stood on a chair and asked Raj Kapoor, in his joker’s attire, to come and stand at the foot of the chair. I used a special wide angle lens which would distort heavily, and shot the picture with the camera only one-and-a-half feet away from his face. He was very reluctant to pose that way, but I told him that I would take only two shots — one of him laughing with his arms outstretched, and the other with a sad expression on his face. The effect was to turn him into a caricature with a large head and a small body. When Raj Kapoor saw the photograph he jumped out of his chair saying, “This is my Joker! Tell my cameraman that this is the effect I want in my movie. I want to be a cartoon, a caricature!”

“Unfortunately I don’t have that picture any more. The colour slides never came back from the press. Raj Kapoor was always very co-operative. I once did a very interesting shoot in 1967 or 1968 with him sitting in front of the publicity posters of all his movies. One of the posters had a huge picture of Nargis’ face on it, and he insisted that her face should be seen next to where he was sitting.”

But even as he recounts his successes and his experiments, the veteran photographer laments the reluctance to experiment these days. “I don’t see that kind of enthusiasm anymore, to try and do something fresh and different. There are only a few people willing to experiment. I had a very good rapport with Shashi Kapoor and Dev Anand because they were always game to experiment. They were constantly on the lookout for something special or different in their pictures. It was always a pleasure to put my skill and technology to use for them. Similarly I had a very good rapport with Simi with whom I did a series of very good photos.”

Chawda, who likes doing portraits best, describes himself as an artist who paints with his camera. He says, “Between photography and painting, I see painting as the better art form. I have studied the work of painters like Rembrandt and Joshua Reynolds and tried to translate into photography, the techniques they used in their paintings. Since I haven’t the patience to use a paint brush, I use modern technology for faster results. This way my painter’s instinct has been satisfied. Certain elements can be made to look like brush strokes. Very often I paint the backdrop of the portraits. In 1989 I did a Mahabharat picture of Mukesh Khanna in costume where I tried to give a Rembrandt effect with a heavy play of light and shadow. The idea was to give the photograph the effect of a painting. Then I have a portrait of Hema Malini which is gilt framed on canvas.” Chawda prefers to work indoors rather than outdoors because he likes to arrange the lighting to his exact requirements. “I take a lot of time preparing for the portrait, the mood — in the same manner that an artist takes time over his painting. Leonardo Da Vinci took four years to complete Mona Lisa, so I should take at least half an hour to prepare for my portraits!” he laughs.

Where there is no action, Chawda creates movement with special technical accessories. "I like to add something to reality," he says, “My own touch, artistry and perspective. Otherwise any amateur can record reality. Nowadays the ‘art’ element in glamour photography is missing. Probably because the pictures are taken in a hurry,” he sighs.

By the late 1970’s Chawda terminated his 15-year old contract with Lux. It was a contract which, for years, had brought him in contact with promising newcomers who had been signed on for the ad campaign. The mantle passed on to Rakesh Srestha. In fact, as early as 1970, glamour photography started taking a backseat in Chawda's career. That year he lost his studio at Churchgate due to litigation. “I could have held on to it but I wasn’t aware of the legal technicalities,” he says regretfully. “I was in New York at the time and when my brother phoned me, I simply instructed him to let go of it, without consulting any lawyer. It was a big blunder. That studio had served me well for ten years. People like Lata Mangeshkar, Prithviraj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar used to come regularly, even on Sundays when the lift wasn’t functioning and they had to climb up four floors.”

After losing his studio Chawda went away to Bangalore. He continued with photography there but concentrated more on photographing other celebrities like dancers and musicians rather than filmstars. “I have photographed practically all the well known classical dancers of India, right from Bala Saraswati to Kamala Laxman from Yamini Krishnamurti to Sonal Mansingh,” he says proudly.

Dhiraj Chawda continues to photograph celebrities, landscapes, dancers, and everyday life. His fascination with the visual medium has not diminished in the least. Having made several documentaries on various aspects of Indian culture, he is now planning a television serial which will highlight Indian heritage. “Just as Mahabharat has succeeded in helping people to understand their heritage and learn things like how to respect their elders, I want to make a serial which will promote an understanding of our culture,” he says.

Whether or not Dhiraj Chawda realises this dream, he will always be remembered with admiration and appreciation as a photographer who executed his work with artistry and conviction. No doubt Gautam Rajadhyaksha speaks for many admirers when he says, “Chawda was a polished trendsetter of the time. Many of the stars of those days remember him fondly as a meticulous photographer. The present generation of photographers owes a lot to people like Dhiraj Chawda.”