Documentary filmmaker, stunning photographer, environmental conservationist and graphic designer. Anirban Dutta Gupta tells MiD DAY how he integrates wildlife with art and conservation with photography
Documentary filmmaker, stunning photographer, environmental conservationist and graphic designer. Anirban Dutta Gupta tells MiD DAY how he integrates wildlife with art and conservation with photography
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Sangam of muddy Zanskar and warm green Indus, Ladakh |
My passion is wildlife and the environment.u00a0 I liked wildlife conservation, photography, drawing and painting and all these came together at the National Institute of Design.
"Before you go on a wildlife or natural history shoot, you imagine a certain scenario. But getting those shots is something else. More often than not, on the tenth day, everything falls into place and makes it all worthwhile. We were shooting this very shy birdu00a0-- the Lesser Florican (Sypheotides indica) for a film. It was visible to us as just a speck for a week. And then, on the last day, it came out and displayed itself.
Once we were shooting for a film on the man-animal conflict and heard reports from villagers on how they had spotted a tiger. For 14 days, we didn't even hear a growl. But on the last day of the shoot, early in the morning, this tigress just walked out of the jungle, crossed the road in front of us went into a lake and basked in the sun. It was like a private show for us!
"Wildlife films that come out of India are very few, and those too are funded by large corporates. Permissions to shoot are difficult to come by. It costs Rs 15,000 a day to shoot in a national park. And unless you are supported by National Geographic or BBC, no one is going to give you this kind of money. Especially when there's no guarantee that you will get what you want in a single day. If you say you need 20 days to get a shot of a tiger, no one is going to agree with you!
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Prayer flags against an angry sky, Matho Gompa |
"Making wildlife documentaries requires lots of patience. You have to endure harsh conditions, waiting for hours, walking through leech-infested jungles. And you have to trust the locals -- I would never go into the jungle without taking a local with me and I would explicitly follow his advice however stupid it sounds to me.
"The creative eye in photography is built with practice. Either you have it or you don't. The rest is the technical part, which can be learnt. For me, the Ladakh trip has been immensely satisfying. The time was just right -- at the end of March. Spring was just coming in and colour and light were slowly seeping in. There were yellow tinges to the landscape, as if from a long hibernation, everyone and everything was slowly waking up. The light and landscapes were amazing and dramatic. Ladakh is such a beautiful place; it's hard not to take good pictures.
"When I am placed in a scene, I am just very excited being there -- observing and experiencing it. I feel like an explorer. There's a sense of adventure and achievement. This sense of achievement is also a process. For you are already constructing that scene in your mind as you pass a place. Perhaps when you're driving down a road, you see the trees and monastery and know that if all these elements were in this kind of arrangement, it would make a great shot. So I don't know if one can really say even whether a shot is spontaneous or not. Even if nature is making the perfect frame, you should have the mind's eye to capture it. In this training, past experience and creativity play a role.
"Spiritually, I believe there is a larger force. If you observe wildlife minutely, you know its there in the synergy that exists between the various components of nature. There is a time and season for everything. There is a balance to it.
"I am fascinated by how geography affects the environment. I was working on a book of handicrafts from NID and had gone to Cooch Behar for research. We went to a tea stall where they gave us tea in plastic cups andu00a0 not earthenware. We pointed out that this wasn't environmentally friendly.
"The tea stall owner told us that the earth around was silty, and if they had made cups of that earth, any liquid would become sandy.u00a0 So these plastic cups were actually a geographical need!
"My high comes from discovering things. My work allows me to travel, stumble upon things and archive them. My motivation is not to affect social change. My belief is if something excites me and I can capture it and show it to somebody who in turn is affected by it, it's great."
