Meet William Dalrymple, the photographer

He can hardly hear us over the phone. Finally when he does, William Dalrymple, who we all know as the Scottish author, art historian and writer of acclaimed books such as In Xanadu, White Mughals and Return of a King among others, exclaims, “I’m stuck in a traffic jam at Aurobindo Marg in Delhi. It’s so hot, feels like the middle of March!”

Documents of solitude

Above the still-audible noise of tooting horns, we hear something else — the excitement in Dalrymple’s voice. And this time, it’s not to do with the release of a new book. The accomplished writer, is in fact, looking forward to The Writer’s Eye, an exhibition of black-and-white photographs which he took over a period of two years. The show opens at the prestigious Sunaparanta, Goa Centre for the Arts on March 18, travels to Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi on March 29 and then heads to the Grosvenor Gallery in London on June 16. A limited-edition book with an essay and photographs by Dalrymple with an introduction by writer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, who is also the curator of the exhibition, will also be released. About the photographs, Shanghvi told us, “They were, both extremely quiet and very restrained, distinguished by visual language with literary antecedence; yet, they were ultimately their own thing, handsome documents of solitude.”

Dark room memories

There is a tinge of nostalgia in Dalrymple’s voice as he recalls his days of yore, as a seven-year-old, taking pictures with his Kodak camera which was gifted to him and later, as a 15-year-old, with a Contax 35mm SLR with a pin-sharp Carl Zeiss T* lens. “At an age when others were out chasing girls, I would sit in the dark room developing pictures. I would sit for hours and hours, fiddling, cropping and experimenting,” he chuckles. Then his love affair with writing took over and photography had to take a backseat.

Finding geometry

It is now that the multi-faceted man has re-discovered his passion for the world behind the lens. His travels over the last 18 months has taken him to places as far and beyond as Central Asia to the deserts of Western Iran, from the beaches of Scotland to the hills of Tuscany. Leh, Lucknow, Hyderabad... his camera has captured them all in shades of black-and-white. “In my younger days, I used to prefer black-and-white photography, which I find a more powerful medium. It takes out the noise and colour and reduces the photograph to its essence. It becomes about finding shapes and geometry in nature,” he explains.

On-the-go!

And it is all done with the help of a phone camera! No more fancy camera equipment for him now, Dalrymple fishes out his Samsung Note whenever the urge to capture a moment grips him. “Quite often, there is no camera with me at a crucial moment and the camera phone is really good. Often, I spend an entire four or five-hour road journey from Jaipur to Agra, editing them,” he adds.

‘Darker than my books’

It’s natural to ask him whether the two worlds of writing and photography find a meeting ground and he replies, “Yes, they overlap. You can see it in the imagery of Mughal architecture, the monuments and jaali screens. However, my photographs are much more darker than my books, some of them quite apocalyptic,” says William, and adds with a laugh, “They surprise me sometimes. I don’t know where they are coming from!” And does he analyse his own work? “I’ve had to. These photographs were taken over a period of time and I expected them to be put on Facebook or Instagram, not in an exhibition or a book!”