Pablo Bartholomew’s works are a continuum of time and space—a study of human subsets from the outside.
The portraits are silent, hauntingly so. They stir you to speak. Just to hear some words, some chatter of nonsense that would deny the silent presence of these souls that look out as though from the edge. It’s that edge of pit feeling that hits your solar plexus as you find yourself being swallowed in their black and white reality. It’s as though a time machine has gobbled you up and you are guilty of voyeuristic participation in intensely personal denouement of self. There is neither approbation nor guilt, just a chilly matter of factness about the subjects.
They are the morphine addicts, Pablo Bartholomew’s friends, fellow hash users, the hippie generation with their free love and life motto. There is absolute disregard and apathy for social morality. There is one speaking image of Pablo, looking straight at the camera, stoned, yet defiant and proud of whatever he is. What is it that impels these young people to surround themselves in a haze of morphine smoke? Is there some pain, rejection, fear, or what?
Pablo let’s you read into silences. But this collection of work remains among the most precious to Pablo.“My first photo essay on the life of a morphine addicts is important because it was a very intimate look at persons like these and it got international recognition for being a strong portrayal.” This body of work on morphine addicts titled Time is the Mercy of Eternity fetched Pablo First Prize at the World Press Photo in 1975 when he was just 20.
This was a vindication of the immense talent of the school dropout who was expelled from school for drug taking. The morphine addict series is also special for the self taught photo essayist produced this classic work in his father’s the darkroom. He literally pushed the envelope of his budding genius and cheap technology to achieve these astounding results. The series was to be a precursor to Pablo’s dark, brooding works that cocked a snook at society for its ill-kept secret—the dark underbelly, the marginalized and then later the evils of a civilized world . It is here that he found his ready subjects—the offal of humanity.
“Again a few years later I photographed the Indian Chinese community in Calcutta. This was the first time that I attempted a large documentation on the lives of a community that was in transition,” says Pablo. If morphine addicts immortalises the self exiled urban youth in hypnotic trance, spaced out, with no cares, exuding a kind of self induced inertia of purpose in life, and a self centered disregard for all things outside their charmed circle; the photo essay on the Chinese of Calcutta transports us to another dark world, where an apology seems due but never sufficient.
“It was this feeling that drove me to explore the Tangra and Dhapa areas of South Calcutta, photographing amongst the Chinese community or whatever fragments of them that remained. Brutally mistreated, especially after the hate that developed against them as the ‘enemy’ following the national humiliation of India’s defeat to China in 1962.” It was a feeling of kinship, shared marginalisation, that drove Pablo on the assignment. Conscious of his mixed origin, it was a therapeutic exercise for the artist to give silent voice to the Chinese Indian community living in Calcutta since the first flux of settlers from Mainland China in 18th century. “My engagement with the Haka Chinese community in the Tangra area, this group who lived, owned and ran leather tanneries, and in a diminished way still does, was my first endeavour to document a community in transition, coming to terms with themselves, marginal, closed but proud, and friendly. It was also a way to look at my mixed Indian and Burmese origins and find away to deal with these churnings in my late teens and early twenties.”
The outcasts—so here perhaps was the reason for the angst ridden social exiles?
Pablo’s entry into photojournalism took a rather circuitous route. “In 1982 after earning enough money working in the Bombay Film Industry and Advertising and especially being paid quite handsomely on the sets of the film Gandhi, I was able to travel abroad for the first time and went looking for a photo agency,” recounts Pablo.
But before we jump ahead with our story, here’s a bit about Pablo’s brief brush with India’s great cinema factory—Bollywood. In 1982, Pablo was already a recognized name and working in films, fashion, theatre and much. His photo essay on the Chinese Indians of Calcutta came about during the time he working with Satyajit Ray on his iconic Satraj ke Khiladi for which he did the stills. In 1982, he worked with another masterpiece, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.
From Delhi’s opium dens and domestic photography of his earlier phase he has graduated to the photographing those on the fringes and then the exiles—a progression of his artistic oeuvre—that exhibited his expanding world vision of human suffering in a world of painful imbalances.
Pablo’s progession into a renowned photojournalist came at this juncture. “I was able to travel abroad for the first time and went looking for a photo agency. It was through this process of finding Gamma-Liaison, a French American Agency that I started this part of my career in 1983 with some early assignments covering the Nellie Massacre in Assam, the start of small Sikh protests for more water and electricity that led to the Khalistan movement, to opertaion Blue Star and the storming of the Golden Temple, Indira Gandhi's assignation to the anti Sikh riots. The coming of Rajiv Gandhi to power, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, V. P. Singh and Mandal Commission, Babri Masjid and this list goes on as a documentation of what went on in India and some of the neighboring counties in South Asia from a period of 1983 – 2000.”
India and its tryst with various viscious hours have been captured for posterity through pablo’s lens. But why always choose the dark side of the moon as his subject?
There is a practical reason of course, for the delineator of harsh realities is no dreamer. “When you work in news, it's “Bad News” that is more compelling. And in the news business, photojournalism is the foot soldier in the process. So you are very much a part of a system that you feed and this beast mainly wants “Bad News”.”
He gave plenty of the particular feed to the beast. The graphic picture of a baby’s burial during his coverage of the Bhopal gas tragedy in 1984 won him the Picture of the Year in World Press Photo Award. International recognition and many key assignments later he remains the same Pablo.
Richard Bartholomew, an art critic and photographer was Pablo’s first teacher, critic and lifelong inspiration. “My father was my primary influence. Many things were learnt at home—watching, hearing and practicing. It would be no difference from let’s say a musician/ dancer family where the younger members learn from the elders. A lot of it is by watching and observing and practicing by yourself.”
Growing up in a modern liberal environment (Pablo’s mother was a Delhi University professor and a theatre enthusiast), Pablo, imbibed the multi-cultural influences that were present at home. His work and life are a reflection of this cultural sophistication.
With many critically acclaimed exhibits to his credit, when asked to name the most memorable to him, Pablo says, “For me the most important is the trilogy of exhibitions that deal with my teenage diary, 70s and 80s - Outside In, A tale of 3 cities (2007), Bombay - Chronicles of a Past Life (2012) & Calcutta Diaries (2012). Through these three exhibitions I am able to revive a time and an era of some of these cities and the way people lived in the streets. This is most important because there is very little documentation about urban India from that time, the culture and the aesthetics that exisited then.”
The stark realities of lives and times are reflected through the images of this era. They are portraits of real people, telling stories of everyday life. There are no models and no photoshopping. It’s stark truth that peeps out at the viewer and hits one with the reality of it all. The portraits are so revealing that you feel you are peeping into their lives through an open window, unknown to them, as they go about their activities and the business of life.
Part of it, seems like a coming of age and coming to terms with life through photography—Pablo has called it “slow photography”, from the lens of an outsider looking at marginal and urban subcultures that he unfortunately abandoned. Back from the world of fast photography and worldwide recognition, he continues “to work on very long term projects. I have been photographing the Indian communities in different parts of the world. I started this in 1987 in America and then gave it a break and did France in 2009, Mauritius and UK in 2010 and now will do Portugal in 2014-15. More recently, my father’s family in Burma found me. That part of the family I had no idea about and there is a whole documentation that I have started around them.” The other thing that has kept him busy is personally archived shows of his and his father’s photography. While “more time and money,” are on his wishlist going forward. “one is limited by one’s life that one has and within that how much time and money one can find and raise to do all the projects that I dream up, he says. But what he would definitely be leaving behind as his legacy for the world of art enthusiasts is “a great archive of my father and my work that will let the future generations enjoy and understand are past.” Padma Shri (2013) awardee Pablo Bartholomew has covered all frontiers of human frailty and documented them for posterity.