DOSSIER : Young Guru

Captured Moments Revisited

David Wayne Dobson

Subject: Young Guru

Location: Calcutta, India 1994

Camera: Contax 645, Toyo Field View 4x5, Hulga 120mm. Film: TMAX 400 120mm, Polaroid Type 55
Lens: Standard Lenses

One of the only places in the world I will wake up early and roam the streets at sunrise to shoot is in my childhood home of Calcutta, India.

I guess I will forever be seduced and held hostage by this city’s British heritage and its magnificent colonial architecture. The once towering architectural trophies of the imperial empire, are now but slumbering giants rotting away, stone by stone, since the creators were forced to abandon this elegant crown jewel and leave it to the millions who would overrun its splendid yet haunting grand facades, like a creature living inside of the corps of another.

Every winter Calcutta gets embalmed in a mysteriously haunting low laying cold damp mist and morning fog that is infused with the smoke of millions of portable clay pot furnaces called “chullies”. Each chullie is fueled by dry cow dung and used by people living on the streets to cook and keep warm through the long cold winter nights.

This winter phenomenon for me is when the ghosts of the rotting giants come back to life.

I arrive by vintage public transport just below the omni present Howrah Bridge lurking amongst the foggy city skyline, and head down to the traditional old flower market. Constantly jostled back and forth through hundreds of flower buyers and animated zealous vendors, I slip through a couple slushy river front temple alleys filled with rainwater and runaway tears.

I squeeze myself between stilted flower vender stalls and push myself out onto a cement covered river landing called Babu Ghat. Loosely translated, Babu Ghat means “Bathing area of the Princes”. Obviously a name that refers to a more glamorous by gone era.

Babu Ghat is where locals come to worship and bath at sunrise in the Hoogley River, a holy tributary of the Ganges river which passes through the very heart and soul of this great city and becomes the bowels that sweep away the sins and waste of over 18 million people with each ebb and flow of the Bengal tides.

At dawn you find hundreds of people bathing, brushing their teeth with charcoal, cleaning their tongues with splintered plant roots, and a handful of holy wrestlers lathered up in sacred oils, wearing hardly a rupee more then a smile, all passionate followers performing their sacred pujas to gods made of river dredge and hay strands, everyone searching for something.

For the past couple of years on morning walks, I had noticed that there was a large congregation of holy men called Sadhus who gathered here in the winter.

The Sadhus travel from all parts of the Indian subcontinent to gather at this very place and worship. Along with the worship comes kilos and kilos of hashish to be divided amongst themselves and smoked in pipes before heading out into the roads, lanes, and gullies of this massive city, offering blessings and a splash of holy water from the Hooglee river, with the promise of blessings in exchange for a small offering of your choice, as long as the offering amount is consistent with the sins forgiven!

Sadhus pride themselves in personal attire and self-decoration; most wipe a form of chalk or charcoal dust across their foreheads and then rub their personal insignia into it with their fingers, creating a signature look and style. They are friendly and extremely photogenic, and like most Indian people I know, enjoy having their portrait made.

This year I decided to bring my Toyo field view 4x5 camera, the kind of camera that sits perched atop a sturdy tripod with a black silk towel draped across the top for the photographer to cover his head and block out the sunlight while composing and focusing an image that is both upside down and inverted.

For film I have chosen my favorite, Polaroid Type 55, which yields both a positive print on paper to share with the subject, and more importantly, a proper negative to print from back in Hollywood at Photo Impact.

By shooting with Polaroid Type 55 I will have a print to share with my subject, and as well, create a desire amongst his piers to have their portraits made.

Pulling out local currency to give as an additional gift would be absolutely insane, and would ignite uncontrollable hashish induced chaos at Babu Ghat and delay the dispersment of blessings around town.

Instead, I have devised a plan where I pre pay the local Chai Walla (Tea Man) a handsome amount of money for a cup of hot fresh morning tea for anyone who comes to him with a piece of paper with my personal signature on it...

The Chai Walla gets paid and keeps the change, the Sadhus have the cup of tea they would have had to use their last day’s blessing offerings for for free, I get to photograph them, and they have a beautiful portrait on high value Polaroid Type 55 paper to either light their hashish pipe with or take home and share with friends and family. Win win all around!

This system seems to work really well, word spreads quickly amongst the holy, and I continue shooting Sadhu after Sadhu until I feel a tugging at my pant leg.

At first I think it is a dog pulling at my pant leg and I try to gently shoo it away, but the tugging continues to the point that I am forced to pull back the black cloth from the camera, stop shooting, and sort out this annoying situation.

Once my eyes adjust to the light, I look down for the dog and realize that there never was a dog, but crawling along on the ground with thin spider like legs was a young boy, the youngest and smallest Sadhu I had ever met, begging me to take pictures with him by pulling on my pant leg.

The older sadhus began trying to scare him away so I would continue shooting their portraits, shouting slurred obsanities and waving their arms in the air, sending smoldering hashish ashes everywhere, as if they were going to hit him for interrupting their show at the sidewalk studio.

Immediately I stopped shooting the old guys, focused all of my attention on this young boy, complemented him in front of everyone, switched cameras to the Contax 645 medium format camera loaded with Kodak TMAX 400, and began photographing the young Sadhu by himself, making him the new star of my shoot.

People started gathering around and running behind the young Sadhu trying to get in the shot. Finally we move on further towards the edge of the river. I turn him around so his back is to the river and alleviate any possibility of people jumping into the background of the picture. There are devotees already bathing in the distance behind him, but no one is willing to risk their health and jump in the dark waters to be in the forigners pictures.

There is an intimacy and level of trust between a photographer and the subject in every great picture. We communicate by broken English and Hindi, make shift sign language, head wobbling, and most importantly, lots of smiles.

In spite of the fact that he suffers from Polio and his legs never fully developed, The young Sadhu is an excellent model and gave me quite a range of facial expressions and body positions, on par with the best models I have shot with in Europe and America.

After we got the shot and we were out of film, I got down on my knees in the middle of the river landing so we would be closer together at eyelevel, folded my hands and dipped my head, and thanked the young Sadhu for letting me take his picture.

When I was done, he looked up at me with his charcoal covered face and massive eyes, folded his hands together and raised them up to his forehead and shouted, “No uncle, thanking you only for taking my foto” at which point I was completely shattered from the inside out...

All I had to do to make this little boy suffering with polio feel like a king for once in his life, was to take a couple minutes and shoot some pictures with him.

I will cherish my experiences and adventures photographing my friends at Babu Ghat, and the portraits each Sadhu stood for and blessed me with.

More importantly, I will never forget the life lesson that that young Sadhu boy taught me in realizing that the camera has the power to either destroy or empower, simply by how you choose to point it.