Mark Bennington, the man who 'humanises' the Indian actor

From 2010 to 2015, he was on a quest to photograph actors of Hindi television and cinema

One thing Bollywood stars unfailingly want to know when asked to participate in anything is: who else is going to be in it? This is perhaps why a few big names are absent in photographer Mark Bennington’s ambitious project to “humanise” the Indian actor through images. He planned to document them going about their daily lives, and wanted to cover superstars, strugglers, and everyone in between.
 
Over a period of five years from 2010 to 2015, the New York man was on a quest to photograph actors of Hindi television and cinema, both from the mainstream and parallel industries. It culminated in a coffee-table book, Living the Dream, with 112 photos focusing on the more private or mundane aspects of showbiz lives — a seemingly weary Ranveer Singh getting the final touches of make-up just before he was to fly onto an awards show stage with a harness, or Kareena Kapoor waiting between takes at an ad shoot while a spot-boy holds an umbrella over her head. “A vanity van is actually not that glamorous, it is just pretty plain but people don’t know that,” he says.

 
Bennington had himself worked in classical theatre and commercials in Los Angeles. In 2003, when his acting career stuttered, he dusted off some old camera equipment of his grandfather who had been an amateur photographer. He took portraits of his friends and got enough work within six months to know he could make a living from it. In something of a cliche, an existential crisis when he turned 40 brought him to India in 2010. He went from doing commercial assignments to working on his passion project in Mumbai.
 

The process of identifying and convincing subjects was not uniformly easy. With help from friends, he embarked on a crash course in Bollywood trivia — shortlisting 60 diverse names, learning about family trees, and watching movie clips. He met resourceful people — producer Guneet Monga, who introduced him to independent cinema favourites, and casting director Shanoo Sharma, who helped him reach talent from major banners.

 
Struggling actors were accessible at the many casting offices in Mumbai’s Yaari Road, close to where Bennington lived. To contact character artists like Prem Chopra, he looked up actor’s directories and found landline numbers that surprisingly still worked. A few declined to participate after e-mail exchanges, others had him show them photos before they were published. Some asked to be re-shot.
 
The idea of capturing their ordinariness was at times difficult to get across to larger-than-life figures. Bennington did a traditional photoshoot only to appease Dharmendra but used a picture clicked in that actor’s living room instead. Hema Malini was flummoxed when he said he wanted a picture of her watering plants, just as she had been doing when he entered her house.

 
Bennington said he had an advantage in being both an outsider and insider; he was never awestruck by stars and at the same time knew the quirks of the business. Particularly interesting is a picture of Malaika Arora in a glitzy pink dress sitting on a ledge backstage, unmindful of the paan-stained wall behind her. “I wanted to show ‘What does life really look like for actors?’ Not in a way that I am trying to de-glamourise it, but trying to humanise it.”
 
Not all photos are entirely natural as Bennington chose to take creative liberties while photographing newcomers. He does give in to some tendencies of the Western tourist. In trying to represent Mumbai through the photos,  he had Adil Hussain pose as if emerging from an autorickshaw, a yet-to-debut Swara Bhaskar took a local train ride, while Neetu Chandra stuck yoga poses on the beach.

 
With each photo in the book, Bennington has a conversation snippet. The time he had with his subjects could range from two days to 30 minutes, and the ice was not always successfully broken. “I had never interviewed anyone before.” he recalls. “I really wanted Kareena to talk about juicy gossip because she had a feud with Katrina back then. But she wouldn’t.” Bennington plans to exhibit his photos in pop-up shows and art galleries later.