S.Paul
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S.Paul
Bandeep Singh , Shooting ace “India Today” 4/9/2017
Paul saab, as he was fondly known, photographed incessantly with the lusty passion of one newly in love with the camera. He often described himself as an 'amateur by heart and a professional by fate'. His house is a trove of over a million images, some five lakh of them in negatives and slides. It is a work of many lifetimes. He was 88 when he passed away on August 16.
Born in the Jhang district of Pakistan, S Paul first found work as a photographer in the '50s in Simla, where he set up a department of photography for the state government. His best professional phase was as chief photographer of Indian Express which he joined in 1962. It was the age when independent India's visual identity was being fashioned by a new generation of photographers of the likes of Sunil Janah, TS Satyan, Kishor Parekh and S Paul, whose humanism and empathy replaced the ethnographic and colonial gaze of the early British photographers. S Paul is best remembered for his strong pictorial compositions of life on the margins: children at play, farmers in rustic landscapes, human forms at work. A strong pictorial appeal was central to his work as photojournalist for 22 years. In one famous instance, at an outdoor inauguration by Indira Gandhi, at the very critical point where she was to cut the ribbon, S Paul chose instead to photograph a line of swans passing overhead. Arguably India's most awarded photographer, S Paul has won almost every prestigious international photo contest, and his images have been published in reputed photography publications. His penchant for the perfect single shot, often of a simple subject, is sometimes criticised for lacking narrative structure or curatorial vision. Despite the huge volume of work, he does not have even one photobook to his name. "That is because he was a perfectionist and wanted everything his way, which would make no commercial sense to a publisher," says his photographer son Dheeraj Paul. This, however, had no bearing on his stature as one of India's most skilled and large-hearted photographers. In a country which for long had no training institutes for photography, S Paul mentored a whole generation of photographers, among them his famous younger brother, Raghu Rai. It is in their fond stories of him that S Paul's life has its best exposure.
