At the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts earlier this month, where author and historian William Dalrymple's debut exhibition of photography, The Writer's Eye, was unveiled, white frames hung like windows. Dark pools of stagnant water with the promise of a ripple, Cypress trees flanking a road appearing to go skyward, arches with divine light filtering through—they appeared like portals to the unknown. While the exhibition does away with captions, we know it brings together worlds as diverse as Leh and Lindisfarne, Golconda and Rome. This makes sense. For Dalrymple is, before anything else, an insuppressible travel writer.
Shot over the last two years on his Samsung phone, the high-contrast black and white photographs have a cinematic quality. Some evoke the mise-en-scène of iconic cinema: there are Hitchcock's birds in flight and a landscape that looks lifted out of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali. The photos might have been made and processed on a cellphone—“most intuitively and instinctively,” insists Dalrymple—but they betray the pre-mediation of an auteur.
Curated by the writer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, the exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Harper Collins India. Shanghvi shares he came across Dalrymple's photographs over dinner a year ago at the Goa home of Raj and Dipti Salgaocar, the founders of Sunaparanta. The exhibition, thus, brings this discovery full circle.
With The Writer's Eye currently on view at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi before it travels to Grosvenor Gallery in London, Vogue spoke to Dalrymple about his return to photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson's Leica and what he might have in common with Sam Mendes. Edited excerpts from the interview:
In your essay in the book, you write about the danger of analyzing your own work. But you have identified that your photography favours the dark and remote—adjectives one wouldn't use for your writing. Was it surprising to discover this other side to yourself? You have to stand back when you're thinking about this because it seems to me that when you're writing, you engage a very different part of your brain to the part you engage when you're acting visually. Writing in general is considered an intellectual activity. You have a million possible ways of telling a story but you choose to tell it in one way. A good writer will fiddle around with his text over and over again until he is happy. When I started as a writer, I thought good writers pulled words out of the air like dictation from angels. The more I get to know the writers whose prose I really admire, well, they are the ones who polish their prose like a Mauryan sculptor polishing a Yakshi. For me, photography is the diametric opposite of that. You whip out your camera and you capture something that may vanish in a second. It's impulsive, intuitive and non-intellectual.
But you did photography for your first book, In Xanadu (1989). So clearly, you started out doing both and then the writing took over at some point… Yes, it's interesting, by the time I did Nine Lives (2009), I didn't photograph even a single one of the subjects. There's never been a period where I've totally stopped taking photographs. For 10 or 15 years it was just pictures of the usual young married life: pushchairs, groups of children eating birthday cake. Eventually, I started taking pictures on my Blackberry but they were never of any quality. It was when I moved over to a Samsung a year and a half ago that I got excited about photography again. A great majority of the pictures in the show are from the last three months.
The exhibition does away with captions. As a travel writer and historian, so much of your work is about building context. Without that, these images seem like dream spaces. Was that the intention? If I put something up on Facebook, I will always put a caption. This was the curator's decision and I was happy to go with it as it builds on what I was saying about the photographs being intuitive. That does mean that we spent quite a lot of time talking about “that picture with the dog in the middle”. It's been amusing.
You're not someone who just picked up a cellphone, discovered filters and started making pictures. You were an award-winning amateur photographer who was developing his own pictures aged 13. Do you feel the need to underline that? In school, it was my real passion, apart from archaeology. When I was 15, I got my first proper camera, a fabulous Contax 35mm SLR with a Carl Zeiss T* lens. But even before that, I had won a couple of small awards: the Young Archaeology Photography Prize and a North of England Prize. There was a particular portrait I remember vividly. I was on an archaeological dig when I planned to go and stay with some posh cousins, who lived about 10 miles away from where I was camping. It had been the most riotous Friday night and I'd woken up hungover. I decided to walk to my cousin's house to try and clear my head a little. And I passed this tramp on the road who had the most amazing face I've ever seen. It had all the experience of his life etched on to it.
Do you still have that picture? I must have it somewhere. Actually, now I'm taking an interest in this again, I must dig out the archive. I dug them out a year ago because The Folio Society produced a 25 year special edition of In Xanadu. There are six Lever Arch files with contact sheets and film. I was very meticulous in my twenties.
What has three decades of writing added to your photographic process? I feel I'm taking the same pictures I was taking as an 18 year-old, although there are different landscapes now like Central Asia and India. Back then, it was possible to very cheaply and very easily develop black and white images, which is what I did. You could develop it yourself or take it to Boots chemist and have it done in an hour. So anyone who was into instant or serious photography when I was growing up was doing black and white. Only tourists and people who took family pictures went for colour. That has stayed with me.
Henri Cartier-Bresson went so far as to say that colour photography was vulgar. But for you as an Indophile, I feel there's a conflict. The great Indian photographer Raghubir Singh argued that colour was intrinsic to the Indian aesthetic. Where do you stand on that? I'm very divided. I'm aware that I'm losing a lot using a cellphone, including producing good colour images. There are many things that you can do on a DSLR that you can't do on a cellphone, particularly variable lenses, wide angle, depth of field. What you gain with a cellphone though is the simplicity that the system gives you and the way you can concentrate on the image. Often when you're sitting with a DSLR, you're worrying about light and technique and you're fiddling around with the dials on the top of your camera, all of which I have done obsessively. And now there is a kind of liberation in not having to worry about that. There's also something to be said about the guerilla technique that a cellphone allows.
Cartier-Bresson always shot on a Leica because it was tiny and the noise of the shutter was almost inaudible. All the great photographers of that era, even Robert Capa, used a Leica. They could be hidden within clothing and the lens only came out a couple of centimeters. They were effectively an extension of the eye compared to the large format cameras everyone else was carrying around in those days. The cellphone takes it a stage further. When you're holding up your phone, even if you're pointing it directly at someone, you could just be looking at your email. You can even sort of fake it by pretending to tap on it. You could take a whole series of portraits of someone without them being aware.
What's your personal ethic on that? Do you seek a subject's permission before shooting? There are two different sorts of portraits. There's the formal portrait when you definitely ask the person. But it's a different thing when a group of people are doing something that you want to capture unobserved. If Henri Cartier-Bresson were alive today, he would definitely be using a cellphone camera. It has everything that he loved: the invisibility, the lack of sound, the lack of formality. And it allows for that sensation of being the hunter, walking on tip-toe through the forest camouflaged.
Who are the other photographers who have influenced your work? Growing up, I greatly admired the English landscape photographer Fay Godwin. She was a formative influence. There was a book in my school library that I kept returning to called Remains of Elmet for which she collaborated with the poet Ted Hughes. It was the first photography book that I really loved. It had these brooding North England landscapes—Elmet is a lost Anglo-Saxon kingdom that occupies West Yorkshire which is where Ted Hughes was from. My school was in North Yorkshire. In Delhi where I live now, winter lasts three weeks. In Yorkshire, the winter used to last seven months. I only read about daffodils and cherry orchards in Shakespearean poetry. So a lot of my early photographs were dark, brooding landscapes with big clouds and beautiful dry stone walls that would photograph brilliantly in black and white. The best season for photography in Yorkshire, in fact, was March and April when the snow which was thick on the ground melted but left depressions and ruts.
Most of your writing has been about going beyond Scotland and out into the world. With your photography, it appears that you're travelling to a deep, interior place. You are, in a sense, returning to your earliest memories. Do you feel like these images expose a vulnerable part of you? You make it sound very romantic. It certainly is the case. What I'm accessing though is not what the writer intellectually accesses when he goes to search his childhood attic: memories, vulnerabilities, that sort of thing. I see the visual imprint of Godwin's work on my images: the way she would shoot a field, the way she dealt with landscape. And there's one image which Raghu Rai picked for his magazine, Creative Image. It's a hedgerow and on Google I found an almost identical Fay Godwin image which I had half-forgotten. I think what I'm doing is channeling the visual props of that period. It's interesting that I only spend two or three months a year in Scotland and yet most of the photographs that made the cut for the exhibition were all either from there, or places that resemble Scotland. The kind of images that seem to be more successful, exactly as you say, are those that fit into the template—wild, bleak, desolate. I recently travelled around South India and made many images but very few of them made it to the exhibition. Maybe I haven't learnt yet how to shoot the tropics.
Now that your pictures are in the commercial space, do you see yourself as very tied to the cellphone idiom? Producing the exhibition has revealed even more to me of the limitations of cellphone photography. It's very easy to blow up cellphone images to about 1ft x 3ft but you can't go beyond that. About a quarter of the pictures we shortlisted were rejected on grounds of pixilation. That said, on a purely cynical ground, the exhibition has got publicity just for the fact that the images were shot on a cellphone.
You're part of a growing tribe of cellphone photographers. Sooni Taraporevala and Steve McCurry are working on books, Raghu Rai is Nokia's imaging ambassador and Dayanita Singh is an Instagram star. But all of them have conventional photography work behind them already. Do you worry you might be restricting yourself? Like I said earlier, there are a few wonderful things about the cellphone. Apart from the camouflage, there's also the idea of just playing with the images. When I'm travelling in India, I often have five or six hour journeys and I love the process of editing on Snapseed. I do it in the same way that I remember my mother knitting and being able to engage in conversations at the same time. I can still be present in a room and be minimally good company. I can spend several hours at a time producing 30 or 40 different versions of a single picture.
You've gathered quite the reputation for being a photographer's writer, having written the introductions to books by David Bailey, Prabuddha Dasgupta and Steve McCurry. If you had to pick a writer to introduce your photos who would that be? Bruce Chatwin if he were alive because he was a travel writer who also took photographs [they were exhibited posthumously] and he's been a very important influence. I was in Nagaland recently to research the text for David Bailey's book–it was the first time since I've begun to think of myself as a photographer again. My wife, Olivia, was very comic about me being unable to decide whether to hold my notebook or grab my phone. There was certainly a conflict.
This is being called your first photo exhibition but you've had one before while you were still in college. Tell us about it. My girlfriend in my second year in Cambridge was in Clare College and she arranged that for me—it always seems to be other people making my photographic arrangements! The show Hajj: An Islamic Pilgrimage was exhibited in this multi-purpose arts room in a beautiful 17th century building. While I was installing the show, there was a theatre company rehearsing Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht. This was October 1986. The chap directing the play was a star college cricketer called Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 1999; Spectre, 2015). He went on to win a few Academy Awards. His first directorial job and my first exhibition were being conceived at the same time.
‘The Writer's Eye: Photographs by William Dalrymple' is ongoing at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi until April 20 and opens at Grosvenor Gallery in London on June 23. The accompanying book, ‘The Writer's Eye' (Harper Collins), is available for pre-order online.
