Welcome back to our photography series, Far-Flung. Eva Clifford is speaking to the best landscape and wildlife photographers from all over the globe about the vistas that have charmed and thrilled their lenses.
For the fifth trip on our Far-Flung adventure, we dive into the monochromatic with photographer Jayanta Roy, and the extreme natural beauty of his homeland, India.
Reflection of Mt. Chowkhamba on water in a place called Madmaheswar, in Uttrakhand, Indian Himalayas.
For as long as he can remember, Jayanta Roy wished to own a camera. Born near Calcutta, India, Jayanta remembers the place he grew up in as having a village-like atmosphere full of trees, open grounds, rivers and lakes, and he wanted to capture the beauty surrounding him. But procuring a camera back then was no simple affair.
For decades, photography was a pursuit reserved for a privileged few in India. “Before the economic liberalisation of 1991, when India was a closed economy, cameras and films were prohibitively expensive,” says Jayanta. “My father was a government employee; he told me a camera and films were too expensive for us to afford, but a few months later he bought me a used camera from somewhere. Films were still out of my reach though, so I shot very few rolls.
“A few years later, I went to Darjeeling with my aunts and uncle, and a local studio owner loaned me a camera and one film roll. I used that one roll very carefully for 12 days stay in the Himalayas; that was my first encounter with the mighty mountain range, which became a lifelong love affair.”
It was only when he got home that Jayanta discovered the camera he was using was broken, and the entire film was ruined. “It broke my heart,” he says. “Even today I wonder how those shots would’ve come out if the camera worked properly.”
Jayanta’s generation – which witnessed the massive transformation of the country from a rural agriculture-based, underdeveloped country, to an emerging economic powerhouse following the economic liberalisation – was significantly affected by the changes.
A morning in Varanasi, heartland of Indian religious tradition for last three thousand years, Varanasi is one of the oldest city in the worlds. Located beside the Ganges river in Uttar Pradesh.
“We lost our old values, social structure and nature,” says the photographer. “As a sensitive human it made a profound impact on my psyche, I saw the place around me change rapidly: trees are gone, water bodies are gone or polluted, open fields are [turned] into housing projects or shopping centers.”
In 2010, Jayanta left the city. Equipped with his own camera, he began travelling ‘like a madman’ and making photos around the country – mostly in the Himalayas. Formed around fifty million years ago, the mighty mountain range stretches 1,500 miles (2,400 km) through Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan and is the source of ten major rivers, including the sacred Ganges River.
Madhuganaga, a tributary of the Ganges river, where thousands of small rivers like this supply water to the main Ganges
“The Himalayas is my salvation,” says Jayanta. “It is not only the world’s largest mountain range, it is like a living organism, home to millions of people and belonging to different cultures. For the last 10 years, I’ve been entirely focused on the Himalayas and trying to cover an area not visited by me before.
“As the American author Elizabeth Strout says: ‘Our whole present tense takes place in the shadows of the original, pure impressions of childhood. We may think we’re growing, getting older, but we’re just trying to get back to the reference point.’ I try to find India that was lost through my photography, in my way.”
It is not only the world’s largest mountain range, it is like a living organism
While Jayanta has spent a decade photographing in the Himalayas so far, nothing is predictable in the mountains and he’s experienced some risky situations.
In 2019, Jayanta was traveling to a series of ancient Hindu pilgrimage sites in the Dev Bhumi (‘land of the gods’) region of Uttarakhand. “Those places are very old and the backdrop of the Hindu epic Mahabharata,” he says. “They’ve been visited by people for many millennia, but I was trekking on the offbeat routes which are rarely visited by outsiders.”
ArrayA boatman returning home on dark dal lake in a winter night
Before the trek, Jayanta spent the night in Dumak village, which with its secluded location and lack of mobile phones and internet, remains cut off from the rest of the world. In the morning, his 20-year-old guide alerted him about an alternative route they could take. Though he’d never travelled that way before, a villager had explained the route to him and they felt confident they could do it too.
Jayanta agreed and they set off early. But within one hour, they lost their way. The guide returned to the village to get help, leaving Jayanta to wait alone in the forest. An hour passed before he appeared again with the villager who’d initially told them about the route. The man described the way once more and left.
The journey onwards was tough; not only had they lost precious time from the confusion, but the walk now seemed infinite.
Halfway, they met two shepherds from Dumak village. As the only people who ventured this deep into the forest – often staying for weeks on end in a makeshift tent while they tended thousands of sheep – the shepherds knew the route well, so they were able to put the pair on the right track.
An abandoned house in downtown Srinagar, made with willow woods, Kashmir region has around 10000 abandoned house like this, most of them used to own by kashmiri pandit community, an indigenous Hindu community left Kashmir in 1989, when an armed struggle stated by kashmiri Muslims to overthrow Indian rule in the Kashmir valley.
“We started walking again, but the road was long and not as easy as the village guy described,” says Jayanta. “The path wasn’t marked, but we guessed we’d have to climb to the top and somehow find our way to Pancha Ganga camp, which was our destination for the day.
“The weather was heavy, there were clouds and fog and the sound of the wind and nearby waterfalls created a very mysterious moment. I then heard the sound of langurs – a species of monkey – a few hundred feet away. Langurs make a sound like this when they see a leopard, as normally langurs follow leopards everywhere and alert other animals of their presence. It was a real catch-22 situation for us, because in front of us we had a very difficult climb in an almost dark environment, and a leopard had just passed by a stone’s throw away…
“At that moment we heard the roar of the leopard. I was thinking what would happen if we came face-to-face with it, what could we do, but fortunately it was moving away as the group of langurs was moving away from us, or it smelled our presence and decided to leave the place. We reached the top in another 20 minutes, [by which time] it was completely dark.”
The scenes in Jayanta’s photographs – a jungle valley swathed in mist, ravens in mid-flight over a snow flecked sky or boats drifting down the Ganges in moonlight – are a long way from the chaos of India’s cities. While much of the typical imagery we see of India is centred on the colour and havoc of urban life, Jayanta manages to capture the mystical, untouched side of the country.
This is one reason he chooses to photograph in black and white. “Black and white is the language of photography,” he says. “If aesthetic is the central idea of [a] photographers’ practice then black and white is a natural choice. If I shoot documentary photography someday I would like to shoot in colour, but I stick to black and white as long as I do photography for myself.
Dark pine forest near Darjeeling, a hill station founded by British in Indian state of west Bengal.
“Colourful India, or chaotic India, or poor India, is a stereotype created over many decades by foreign photographers. We Indians are trained to see our own country through their eyes and perspective. This situation is changing because of the digital revolution which democratizes photography, but still, much work coming out of India is just an upgraded version of the same perspective and mindset; the only difference is the works are now produced by our people.”
Jayanta adds that while he enjoys the entire process of analog, for him photography isn’t about what camera or equipment one has; what matters is the person behind the lens.
“The biggest thing that analog gives me is time: time to enjoy a place before shooting, time to feel the atmosphere of a place and not just mass shoot anything and everything. I just want to do what I love to do most and experiment with the medium,” he says.
“I believe photography is a lifelong thing, you need a whole life of practice to become fulfilled; it’s more of a journey than a destination.”
