I am Soumyendra Narayan Saha , 47, an erstwhile software engineer. I practice street photography mainly in Kolkata and Varanasi,India.
I had been a software engineer for 12 years when I quit my job partly out of disillusionment and partly because I was bored of crunching 0s and 1s. So with a lot of time to spare I decided to shoot the streets one day and that was it – I was hooked. I started watching photographs online, and also listened to Indian Classical music and watched movies at the local cine club. Today after 5 years on the street, there is hardly any street/lane/gully in Calcutta that I haven’t walked with a camera, or, maybe that is too ambitious .
There has been times when I felt there was nothing to carry on photography for, like when my 10-yr old daughter was diagnosed and treated with a rare and serious autoimmune brain disease but photography kept the spirit alive, the desire to find more and to document or story-tell more was always there.
About The Collection
Simply put this is a result of a 3-year period of street photography that I put in after I had quit my regular day job for personal reasons. I had lot of spare time in my hands and I also had DSLR camera like almost anyone. And I had a lot of visual hunger to satiate after having watched far too many movies. I wanted to see drama like the movies do, only more real and on the streets. To that extent one can say my street photography project was to find drama, humor, intrigue, mystery, surrealism on the Indian streets, particularly in Kolkata. I also wanted to discover the newly-adopted city where I moved in 3 years ago. So many of the places I visited were new which filled me with the urge to see more, shoot more.
I ended up purchasing quite a few photography books to fuel this hunger to see and document un-posed moments of surprise and emotion on the streets. Among them the ones that left a deep mark was “The Decisive Moment” by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raghubir Singh’s India, Koudelka’s Exiles, Richard Kalvar, Diane Arbus.
For me today, photography, more so street photography, is akin to a sort of Zen meditation, where I need to go into a zone, a higher level of consciousness and focus, where I begin to see many things which I would otherwise miss and even predict at times. These are the moments I try to capture as best as I can, and meditate on later in front of my computer at home. It fills me with a sense of exalted meditation. A moment may be a simple arrangement of people and things and a particular quality of light but the end result it evokes whether it is a thought or feeling much much greater than the sum of parts. Therein lies the success, the thrill of street photography and the source of never-ending passion.
Whenever I go out to shoot I keep too things in mind. One is to keep a cultural context, which will remind me of the time and place the shot was taken. A lingering smell of the place and the smile of the people. The other thing I try to keep a constant focus on is geometry. For me geometry is the source of a lot of reality, the reality that we see day-in and day-out consists of a lot of geometrical structures and the underlying mathematics plays a role in our subconscious to shape the reality that we construct.
