TS Satyan's photographs chronicle everyday life

Intimate intrusions — that’s how TS Satyan describes his photographs of people. “My people are not the rich and the famous. They are the simple, ordinary folk. They do not hit the headlines, yet my people are people who matter,” he writes in his artist statement.

Recorder of Life, Beauty and Truth, an exhibition of photographs by Satyan at Tasveer, couldn't have been more aptly titled. The collection on display chronicles everyday life, small joys, fleeting emotions, faith, melancholy and more. The geographical spread of this careful selection from the panorama of life that Satyan recorded is wide - from Afghanistan to London, to Melkote and Sringeri.

One among the first photojournalists of the country, Satyan belonged to the “Mysore generation” of greats like RK Narayan, RK Laxman, HY Sharada Prasad, and MN Srinivas. In fact, Satyan has been quoted saying that the struggle of Narayan to succeed as a writer impelled him to pursue his vocation with a similar rigour and dedication.

Satyan has many friends and fans in Bangalore, and the preview of his exhibition on July 13 saw them gathering to celebrate the brilliant lensman that he was, and applauded the man behind the lens too. Chiranjiv Singh, former ambassador from India to Unesco, an old friend of Satyan — who was also his neighbour in Delhi — spoke of the days when the two friends would meet at each other’s houses and talk for hours on everything but photography. “He was such a family man, he would always talk about his daughter Kalpana, his sons, friends, and so on. He hardly ever spoke of his work,” Singh said.

An outstanding trait of Satyan was his ease while working. “Ease — that was his method. Once he had came to photograph me. We talked, and I was so engrossed in the conversation, and I didn’t even realise when he clicked me. That is one striking quality about Satyan’s pictures — he is at ease and his subjects are at ease.”

He added that he cannot imagine Raghu Rai — renowned photographer — being at ease while clicking pictures. He also likened Satyan to “the best of poets and artists” who disappear in their work. “Like them, in these photographs, Satyan is there and not there too. Only the subject matters, not him.” If Homai Vyarawalla captured the drama of Independence, Satyan captured the drama of everyday life, Singh said.

A photograph of RK Narayan playing cricket with children donned the cover of historian Ramchandra Guha’s book on cricket. Citing how Satyan gave him this picture, Guha said: “Satyan was always a child. I was 40 when I met him first, and he was 74. Yet he was younger to me, and he always was so.” Looking at these photographs with his sociologist’s glasses, Guha said that the diversity of India was what Satyan captured on camera. “In these 30 pictures, there are Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Catholics, and Muslims. But the religion and faith in these are of another kind. It isn’t the religion we see today — which is in your face, one which we know as divisive politics and something that cultivates the rich and powerful. Satyan’s photographs show religion as companionship and faith as solitude,” Guha said. The understated aspects of religion are what you see in these pictures, he added.

Born in 1923 as a Tamil Brahmin in Mysore, Satyan has done special assignments for international agencies like UNICEF. To mark the International Year of the Child in 1979, the UNICEF organised an exhibition of Satyan’s pictures of children at the UN headquarters in New York. His pictures have been published in The Illustrated Weekly of India, Life, Time, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Outlook, India Today and many other publications. Exploring Karnataka, German Vignettes, Hampi – The Fabled Capital of the Vijayanagar Empire, In Love with Life — A Journey through Life in Photographs and Alive and Clicking (memoirs) are his books.

Among the photographs included in this exhibition is a picture of a young boy in Dakshina Kannada, clicked in 1975. The boy is on his way to school, he holds books in one hand, and in the other, an umbrella, and is smiling at the camera. “Satyan would have been this way. That kid is Satyan,” remarked Guha. Satyan, after all, found the extraordinary in everyday life, and showed it to others through his pictures.