JITENDRA ARYA RETROSPECTIVE
Aptly titled Light Works, a remarkable exhibition of photographs by the late master Jitendra Arya traces both his evolution as an artist and the changes India underwent after Partition. Curated by photo-historian Sabeena Gadihoke, the exhibition—which runs through October 8 at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Mumbai—comprises vintage prints from the 1950s to the turn of the millennium. Gadihoke first met Arya in 2010 at his Colaba flat when she was working on a dissertation on Indian photography. “He was very happy that somebody had come to look at his work and showed me piles and piles of scrapbooks containing all the covers of Femina, Filmfare, Hindi women’s magazines Madhuri and Sarika that he had taken,” she says. Arya’s photos have been featured on 330
Femina covers and he played a pivotal role in conferring stardom on unknown women. “When he started shooting for Filmfare in 1959, he was making the unknown woman a star on the cover,” says Gadihoke.
Arya, who passed away at the age of 80 in 2011, was also a master of candid photography, as illustrated by his pictures of Nutan playing with her dogs and Dev Anand enjoying breakfast with his wife Kalpana Kartik and cuddling his son Sunil. A section of the NGMA exhibition is an ode to romance as it features candid shots of famous couples such as Prem Nath and Bina Rai on their honeymoon, Ashok Kumar and his wife taking a stroll on the streets of London and Raj Kapoor and Nargis posing playfully on Kensington Street.
Born in 1931, Arya’s tryst with photography began at the age of 10 when he was gifted an Eastman Kodak Brownie camera. A portrait of Kenyan anti-colonial activist Jomo Kenyatta he took when he was 15 was published in the Colonial Times. And candid shots he took of Nehru while assisting Hungarian-British photojournalist Michael Peto on a documentary earned him acclaim in India.
But he shot into the international limelight with his portrait of Ava Gardner on the sets of John Ford’s Mogambo (1953), starring Clarke Gable and Grace Kelly. “Arya was roaming around the sets looking despondent because he hadn’t got any interesting pics. That’s when Gardner called him and said she would give him one. She asked him to go up on a tower, took off her bathing robe and got under the shower. These pics made it to Life magazine in 1953 and changed Arya’s life forever.”