Snapshots of the soul of India

Tarun Chopra's pictures of the country appeal to two diverse audiences.

Both images are iconic, both part of unchanging India, both are used on the cover of Tarun Chopra's book launched last Sunday, yet both address different audiences. The one on the front cover shows a temple elephant blessing a just-tonsured baby, its trunk reaching out like a benediction.

Even though it is an unusual picture, it isn't one that would give many Indians pause for thought. Such images aren't all that rare in real life, where elephants stand next to your car at the traffic crossing near your office! This is an image of "exotic" India meant for foreigners "" as, perhaps, is the book.

The back cover depicts an image that is just as familiar, but nevertheless brings a chuckle. Three people, a local PCO booth, and three heads cradling phones, bent a little to the left, each engrossed in their own conversations.

Despite the rampant accessibility Indians have to mobile phones, this everyday scene repeated ad infinitum all over India strikes a chord with a very Indian viewer "" the second segment of this book's viewership.

It is this dichotomy that mars the book. Clearly, for photographer Tarun Chopra, his travels as director of Ventour Holidays have him visiting the more popular tourist destinations across the country, and it is these that become the subjects of his Hasselblad and Nikon cameras.

The exoticisation of India through somewhat cliched images, therefore, is inevitable. The change, then, is in the black and white treatment of the photographs. Even though some pictures scream for colour, Chopra's black and white film rolls stand resolute.

A book of black and white photographs is a little like art cinema "" you expect the unusual instead of the expected, as a result treatment and content don't match.

"There was no deep thought that went into creating the book," says Chopra, "it just evolved as a collection over the years."

The "collection" contains many excellent-quality pictures all right, but it is a moot point whether they work together as a book. Each photograph is a little gem in itself, but becomes simply "touristy" as a format.

If the destinations are my least favourite part of the book, the best are undoubtedly those in the section on street life. Here too, it is Chopra's pictures that break away from the tourist treadmill that are the best "" the street photographer waiting for custom, barbers and ear cleaners at work, two boys sitting in a local train, a neo-acolyte with a milk pail, rush hour at Victoria Terminus, Mumbai's tiffinwallahs...

Chopra's own favourite is a photograph of bathers in Benares. "I took it with a panoramic camera, and so was able to enter the water with them," he says. "It was like being a part of the photograph though it was a struggle to keep the camera dry," he laughs.

Of course, he sold five 40'x40' prints of the temple elephant at $5,500 each in New York "keeping a sixth for myself", he says. For my money, though, I'd take the three people gabbing at the PCO booth any day.