Monochromagic

A photograph can speak as well as words, if not better. And when a writer takes up the camera, he scripts a new chapter of visual eloquence. In his first ever professional stint with the camera, writer and historian William Dalrymple introduces us to a palette different from that visible in his writing. A suite of black and white photographs, shot over two years, in his forthcoming book The Writer’s Eye are documents of landscapes, conveying potent solitude and brooding strokes of the author.

Surprisingly, photography for Dalrymple long preceded writing. “In fact, it is in my blood,” he says. Dalrymple used to take photographs ever since he was a young child. “I was a mad, keen photographer as a teenager. I have been taking pictures ever since I was given a tiny Kodak for my birthday that was almost the size of a smartphone. I used to develop my own pictures, edit them and spend a lot of time making collages,” he says. It was only when he turned 15 that he could put together some pocket money, and buy a Contax 35mm SLR with a pin-sharp Carl Zeiss T*lens. “For the next five years, I spent most of my time in the school darkroom, experimenting with the pictures and playing around with the fixer and the developer. However, during my 20s and 30s, I got so excited by writing that it absorbed all my creative energies and it took over as the artistic outlet for me,” he says.

It is only when Dalrymple started using a high-end smartphone, that he rediscovered his passion for photography. “It is suddenly with my smartphone that I have realised, after crossing 50, that I can still do this, and I am surprised! It is rediscovering a part of life that you have forgotten about. For me, it is like reliving the memories of a place where you once lived happily and then forgot about,” says Dalrymple, who now has an excellent little camera tucked away permanently in his back pocket.

Dalrymple, a great admirer of black and white photographs, believes that black and white has a “visceral power that colour can never match.”

“Photographers I have grown up admiring like Fay Godwin’s landscape work, Bill Barndt’s uncanny and unsettling images or Don McCullin’s bleak and grainy war photography is mostly in the black and white medium. I think it leads to one further level of abstraction. The kind of photography that I like to do, in fact, goes well in that mode. I worked with Prabuddha Dasgupta whose mastery over the nuances of black and white was totally unparalleled, he spoke to me at length about how versatile the medium is.”

'The Writer's Eye: Photographs' curated by Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi will open Sunaparanta : Goa Centre for the Arts, 18th March, in Goa; Vadehra Art Gallery, 29th March, in Delhi; and the Grosvenor Gallery, June 23rd 2016, London