Hiranmay Karlekar's ongoing exhibition displays the photographer's fascination with lights and shadows. He tells Shrabasti Mallik that he is opposed to photoshopping images
There is something about the interplay of light and darkness that intrigues Hiranmay Karlekar and inspires him to capture it. Photography is about capturing and preserving images that light makes visible, he believes. So, do not be surprised to see a sparkling image of the golden crown of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, set against a velvet black sky at his ongoing exhibition, aptly titled The Magic Realism of light.
“It was the hardest picture to take because the top part of the pagoda is wrapped in gold. When you see it at night, it radiates because it is made of 24 carat gold plates and gold leaves. I needed to capture it in a way which would keep the outside darkness as well as the inner light and for that I needed the perfect aperture. I tried with three to four apertures and luckily one clicked,” said Karlekar.
In the age of editing a photograph and adding special effects, he is very opposed to the idea of photoshopping an image. According to him, one has no business to tamper with the composition of a photograph. He pointed out, “A picture is when you capture something in front of your eyes, just the way it is. At the most you can play with exposure but you have no business to come back from a place and then tamper with the compositions. You do not go to a place in the evening because it is cold. Instead, you go there in the afternoon and click the picture and then give an effect of evening. That is not fair. Photoshopping is falsification of an image — it’s not true.”
A major chunk of the photographs that line the gallery at the India International Centre are from Ramgarh — its beautiful terrains, the golden patches of sunlight over green lands and the serenity of a full moon night — where he lives most part of the year. Some of the other places that grace the walls are Huntington Gardens, Pasadena, Big Sur, Pfeiffer Beach and the Pacific Coast in California, USA, Chirali in Turkey, Phoenix and Sedona in Arizona, Potomac River in Washington DC, Yangon, Kolkata and New Delhi. “My son lives in California and my daughter in Ankara, Turkey so I travel frequently,” he laughed.
The play of lights and shadows have always interested him. He grew up in Calcutta at a time when there were no high rise buildings and when the morning sky was clear into the horizon where he saw the sunrise and the sunset, almost everyday. “I have always had a fascination towards light,” he explained.
This budding interest was piqued when he saw his maternal uncle, Satyajit Ray, taking pictures with his camera. “He was a great influence in my life,” he said and added, “I used to see Manik mama (as Ray was called) taking pictures with his leica M3 camera and he would let me use it sometimes. Then I grew up and my father gifted me a Voigtlander. From there I shifted to Agfa camera which had 6.3 lens and 125 shutter speed. Then I used the Ricoh camera, with 2.8 lens 300 shutter speed in 1960 (regarded as the greatest camera then). In 1966 I bought the Kodak retainer which had 500 maximum shutter speed.”
But it was in 2010 that he shifted to digital cameras. He was travelling and ran out of film rolls, although he was carrying quite a few of them. “That was when I realised that I needed to shift,” he said.