Lucky to have attended the opening of the photographic Exhibition, 'Kolkata to Dhaka1971: Mark Riboud's Lens on History' at KCC last Saturday evening. It was first shown in Dhaka in 2022 and is only apposite that it should have travelled to Kolkata, given the city's involvement with the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Posting some of the exhibits, with captions from the show.
The highlight of the evening was however the presentation by the co-curator, Lorrene Durret, who had started working with Riboud in 2007. Commencing with a brief background of this renowned French photo-journalist's family, childhood and adolescent years, she took the audience through Riboud's extensive travels across the world, ending with his first visit to Kolkata in 1956, when he made the city (and more specifically, the home of his sister-in-law, Krishna Roy) the base of his year-long stay in India, befriending among others, Paritosh Sen and Satyajit Ray (who was then working on 'Aparajito'). He travelled through a wide swathe of the country that year -- from Rajasthan and Punjab to UP, Manipur and Assam, and of course West Bengal. He would return to the city in 1971, to report on the Liberation War.
For most of the presentation, I attempted a hard balancing act: listening to her, seeing the images and trying to capture some of them. But after a point, I gave up. There were just too many riveting images and too short a time to click them in!
I returned home with a sense of having turned the pages of an Atlas: countries, provinces, cities popping up on its different pages, with a dramatis personae as varied as the geographic terrain -- Istanbul, Cappadocia, Iran, China, Japan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally India and Bangladesh.
In his childhood, Riboud was the quietest of his 5 siblings, having a problem speaking in their midst. When his father first gifted him a camera, he told the son that though he was not good at speaking, he may see well. That he did. He looked at the world with great curiosity and compassion, and left behind a remarkable archive of images.