When I first met Ganesh, I didn't know he was a photographer. He didn't know it, either. It was August of 2007 at the wedding of my niece, Khena, to his cousin, Vivek. Ganesh was standing right beside his sister, Soundarya, wearing a blue t-shirt that said, "Italia." At the end of that first trip, he took me on a little tour of Bangalore on his motorbike. I needed to buy some gifts to bring home, so we parked at the end of Commercial Street and walked from there.
He wanted to carry my camera for me. I did not want him to, because it is pretty hard to use a camera if someone else is carrying it. But he REALLY wanted to carry it.
So, finally, I let him.
We then went into a store that sold jewelry and carvings and rugs and paintings and prints and more. It was run by a very aggressive and persistent salesman. I usually abandon such salesman fast, yet, this fellow was also charming and pleasant and fun to talk to, so I stayed to bargain with him. As we dickered, Ganesh lifted my camera and shot a picture of us.
I was surprised when I looked at it later, because it was very good. It is not uncommon for someone to somehow get ahold of one of my cameras and take a picture or few of me somewhere, just for the record. I always appreciate the gesture, but very seldom do the photographs look like anything more than snapshots that anyone would take using any camera.
But Ganesh's image looked like a photograph, like it was done by someone who knew just what he was doing. Impressed though I was, I still reckoned it to be a one-time lucky fluke.
After I returned home, I stayed in almost constant communication with his sister, Soundarya. She would often bring Ganesh's name into the conversation, but not in the context of photography. None of us yet thought of him as a photographer.
Then, in May of 2009, I came back to shoot Soundarya's wedding. Less than a year had passed since I had taken a bad fall, destroyed my right shoulder and it had been replaced with titanium. I still wore a brace on my right wrist and hand, but by then had pretty well figured out how to use my cameras again.
I carried two cameras at the wedding - one with a wide-angle zoom and the other with a telephoto zoom. I had barely started to shoot the wedding when Ganesh volunteered to carry one of my cameras. I told him no, it was okay, I could handle it myself. I carry two cameras for a reason, so that I can switch rapidly back and forth between wider and tighter views, without stopping to change a lens. If someone else is carrying one of them, then I can't switch so rapidly back and forth.
I had come straight off the Arctic sea ice at Wainwright into record-setting heat in Bangalore - 100 plus. I was sweating so hard I drenched my shirt. I know I looked like a wreck - a brace on my right hand and wrist, my shirt soaked in sweat, my hair plastered to my head, drops of sweat falling into and stinging my eyes...
Ganesh was very worried. He kept running off to get me lemonade, and kept urging me to let him carry a camera. He did not understand that when I shoot pictures, even if I look a wreck and even if I am tired, it doesn't matter. I can go and go and go until the job is done. I just don't stop and I don't need anyone to carry a camera for me.
BUT HE REALLY WANTED TO!
I was probably shooting about ten wide frames to every tight frame, so finally I gave in. I let him take the camera with the telephoto but told him to stay close, because I could need it at any moment. I planned to let him carry it for maybe ten minutes and then I would take it back.
I removed the super-wide angle from the camera I was shooting with and replaced it with a 24-105, which gave me a decent wide angle up to a small telephoto. This would cover most situations. Ten minutes passed and I let him carry it a little longer. Soon the wedding progressed near to the point where Anil would place a sacred necklace around Sandy's neck and they would be married.
I knew I wanted to shoot this, the most important moment of the wedding, with both the wide and narrow views, so I turned to retrieve my other camera from Ganesh... but I could not see Ganesh.
Worse yet, at that moment, the aggressive local photographer with the blasting flash decided I was where he wanted to be and so he stuck his elbow into my ribs and started to push. As I was a guest in his country, I had been pretty deferential up until then and had done my best to work around him and when he would spoil my shot, I would move and find another.
But not this time. Not for this moment. This time, I pushed back. "I came all the way from Alaska to photograph this wedding," I told him. "You better back off now." He did. Once, and once only. From there, everything happened fast. I could not stop or move to find Ganesh and get my other camera. I just had to make what was on my camera work. I would get no tight shots.
Back in Alaska, when I finally got a chance to look at that part of my wedding take, I was surprised to find some very nice tight shots of the moment when Anil had placed the necklace around Sandy's neck, shot from the same angle as my wider shots.
"How the hell did I do that?" I wondered.
I thought about it off and on for the next month or two and then suddenly it dawned on me - I didn't do it. Ganesh shot those tight shots - so well that anyone would think it was professional work. He had shot right over my shoulder. Had the situation not been so tense, I would probably have found him and would have been able able to get the camera.
To what end? A certain, beautiful, instant in the wedding of Soundarya and Anil would have been captured either wider or tighter - but not both. Yes, I would have captured the basic scene both wide and tight, because I can switch cameras very fast - but I could have only shot that moment once, with one camera, one lens.
And now it is recorded both ways.
Ganesh and I were a team that day. I just didn't know it at the time. I didn't know he was a photographer.
I know it now, so does he and that's how we both learned. Ganesh has a natural eye that needs no instruction. He has talent and he has passion. Yes, he has much to learn (and so do I) but photography is in his soul. He loves to shoot pictures of birds and wild animals. I can assure you, he has way better pictures of birds than I do. He also loves to shoot pictures of people, especially children. He has a job in high tech sales. His highest goal is to be there for his parents and to support them as they grow old and he feels the best way he can do that is keep doing what he is doing.
If he could make enough to support him and them with a camera, then, yes, he says, he would go professional, as it is in his heart. He says India is different than the US and feels it is almost impossible to make a living as photographer in India - except, perhaps, in the wedding field. In India, there is high demand for wedding photographers.
So he is already getting himself some wedding gigs to see what will happen. A few days ago, he told me about one wedding he was dickering on and how he was going to set a good price and he was not going to go below that price - because he could give them something special, something more than the normal Indian wedding photo shoot. And right there, he already has me beat. If you come to me tomorrow and somehow convince me to shoot your wedding, I will not give you a price. I have never given anyone a price. I'll just shoot it and if you want to do something for me later, fine, if not, that's okay, too. But please don't ask. Unless you are very close to me or we have a special tie, I'm not going to do it. I don't care if I go broke first. I just won't do it.
So Ganesh is already making sure that if he does a wedding, he is going to get decent pay for it. And he has a vision for shooting weddings that I think I have influenced. He might use a strobe sometimes, but when he can he will go for the beauty of natural light and when he has to use strobe, he will learn how to bounce it and shape the light.
But still, he thinks his economic propects are better at his sales job. I cannot second guess him on this, but I do recognize his talent and if I can help, I want to.
He wants to come to Alaska next summer and I want to bring him here. I want to take him to the Arctic Slope and introduce him to the summer birds that come there - and to birds elsewhere in Alaska - and polar bears and moose and caribou and he will go nuts and shoot great pictures.
We just need to figure out how to pay for it. There's got to be a way. There is always a way.
Mostly, I worry about feeding him. He is vegetarian. I don't know how a vegetarian can survive for any length of time on the Arctic Slope, or anywhere out in bush Alaska. But there's got to be a way. We will figure it out. We've just got to get him here, first.
Subhankar Banerjee - he is one of Alaska and the Arctic's finest and most acclaimed photographers. He was born and raised in India. I'll lay odds that sooner or later he will even read this blog post. He found the way. Ganesh can find the way, too - even if only for a little while.
I have written about how cheap things are in India - but not camera equipment. A good camera costs more in Bangalore than it does in Anchorage.
The story of how Ganesh got his first real camera body, the one you see here, is sad. It is one of my old cameras that I outgrew. I gave it to Sandy, because she loved photography, too. Technically, she didn't know anything and was prone to blur, but with her cheap little camera she took some of the sweetest, most sensitive, pictures I ever saw - bugs, calves, cows, puppies, kittens, old ladies, family... pictures that transported me into another world. So I gave the camera to Sandy and Ganesh inherited it from her. He bought the 80-200 lens seen here himself. Now he needs to get a good wide-angle.
Except for the fifth, the photos here are self-explanatory. As for the fifth, the concessioner just spilled hot coffee on Ganesh's hand, and on his camera. The concessioner tends to Ganesh as Murthy wipes the coffee from his camera.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 11:31PM ;)
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