There is something new, this year, to the Chennai Music Season — about as ethereal as its music itself. We are being treated to an experience of music, without stepping into the concert hall. An evocative exhibition of B&W photographs of musicians and dancers brings us as close to the experience of hearing their music or seeing their dance as actually experiencing it.
For older residents of Chennai this should be clue enough that one is referring to the body of photographs of South Indian musicians and dancers, so lovingly shot over some three decades by the late Raghavendra Rao (1932 -2014). ‘Raoji’, as he was affectionately addressed by friends and colleagues, was one of Chennai’s most sensitive photojournalists, who brought enormous empathy and humanity to his day job as chief photographer for The Indian Express and, later, at India Today . He was also the consultant photo-editor for The Hindu BusinessLine, from the launch of the paper in 1994, for almost a decade.
However, away from the daily grind, he was an artist in search of visual poetry. His particularly loving portraits of a range of artistes in the city was a tribute to his creative self and his artistic inclinations and concerns.
Some of the images from this pantheon of portraits — like the profile of a joyously smiling MD Ramanathan, revealing the gap in his teeth or of Rukmini Devi Arundale with a parrot perched on her wrist or of Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer sunk in his easy chair, yet taut with some suffused music — have already passed into the realm of the iconic here.
Raoji came from a school of photography that believed more in emotion, intuition and spontaneity, rather than conscious preoccupation with technical details. In the many conversations we have had, he would always hold firm to the belief that the mechanics of the medium should not be allowed to overpower the poetry of the expression.
It certainly helped that he was familiar with the nuances and complexities of classical music and dance as much as he was with the subjects he photographed. Raoji had a way of being gentle and unobtrusive with the camera and waiting till the person before him was completely at ease with his presence. It often seemed he was interested more in the person than in the photograph of the person. And this certainly reflected in the strange behaviour the artistes showed as Raoji went to work with his camera. There is a seeming letting down of guard, a primal innocence, a loosening up of their assumed ‘persona’ and a soft transparency in attitude as they consent to being recorded for posterity.
This is a far cry from the posed pictures of artistes we are accustomed to in the mass media. Photographing the external mannerisms or quizzicalities of artistes is par for the course; but to be able to cross the zone into their intimate space and capture their reflective moments, vulnerabilities, moods and make them almost equal and honest partners in this image-making exercise, is not given to everyone. It is enabled not just by personal intimacy with the subject, but by complete trust. So, this is saying a lot; Raoji was a photographer you could trust.
As those who visit the Music Academy’s Tag Digital Archive Centre in its premises till January 9 will delightfully discover. Thirty-two exquisitely restored and printed (by the master craftsman V Karthik of Ramana Labs) B&W images — 11 dancers and 21 Carnatic musicians — each one a study in interiority.
The photographs have all the qualities of masterpieces in B&W — a dominant play of chiaroscuro (particularly in a haunting three-quarter profile portrait of vocalist Balamuralikrishna, which almost seems to enter his soul and another epiphanic profile of dancer Sudharani Raghupathy); a masterly sensitivity to grain and tone (as in a superbly balanced shot of Lalgudi Jayaraman tuning his violin); and a quiet awareness of the rhetorical effects of contrast in a picture (a silhouette of dancer Chandralekha against a sunrise on Elliot’s Beach which seems a homage to space or a Malavika Sarukkai, again in silhouette, whose still and coiled body, set against a nilavilakku , evokes the idea of infinite time).
There are the candid shots of a very informal Balasaraswathy or Aryakudi; a flamboyant B Rajam Iyer in the same panel as an energetic shot of a very young Sanjay Subrahmanyan; a fabulous composition of Kalanidhi Narayanan, probably essaying vatsalya rasa , expressing ecstasy with palms diagonally pointing, deliberately juxtaposed against the verticality of a lamp in the foreground; the image of a totally immersed-in-music MS, which is a study in finger movements, one set of fingers caressing the tanpura while the other set spreads out before her in an ineffable attempt to reach out and touch.
However, the punctum of the exhibition has to be the enigmatic, if naughty, image of violinist Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu caught in the act of lighting his cheroot, sucking in the smoke into his toothless cheeks with the same intensity he might pull the bow across his strings. It is a moment. And it draws attention to the felicity with which Raoji could be in sync with those he was photographing.
In Raghavendra Rao’s photographs, you can almost sense his being able to click the shutter on the tala as it attains sama.
(Sadanand Menon is a Chennai-based art writer and photographer )