One For the road

For a Kolkata-based photographer Saumalya Ghosh, street photography is more than a genre of photography. “It’s how I look at the world around me. It is how I feel about the place I live in, it’s how my fellow people are living their day-to-day lives. I love to see the small drama of everyday life as it is staged on the streets. Common people are my heroes and heroines who play themselves in this drama. I’m just a keen observer, a mere admirer and my job here is just to capture the candid, unopposed and unguarded moments of this fascinating ‘Real Life’ drama through my own vision. I don’t interrupt or influence this ‘Real Life’ drama. I accept it as it is, in its original and purest form,” says the photographer, whose works have been published in several national and international magazines, photo books including National Geographic, NatGeo Traveller etc.

An amateur photographer, he started photography in 2012. “I believe that gear is important but vision and expression are more important in photography. For me photography is the visual expression of my feelings at a particular moment of time,” says the self taught photographer, whose works were exhibited at the Indian Photography Festival 2018(IPF) recently.

His search for the missing human connection brought him into photography. “I'm not so good at speaking and writing. I can't express myself well in words. In my childhood I was fond of painting. Later on I became passionate about photography. It is the visual language which has always been my mode of expression. But during my days with painting, I wasn't really happy with my visual expression. Later I realised, I wasn't really able to connect with my subject. The human connection was missing.”

The photographer doesn't believe in the concept of single best picture. He says, “There are situations when I feel satisfied after capturing a moment. May be the outcomes from such situations do not get good response from the viewers. Also there are situations I'm not really happy with the moment I capture. However, the resultant image gets good response from viewers. So basically it doesn't matter. Some images are just close to my heart, they may not be very successful ones.”