Shooting With the Stars

American photographer Mark Bennington on the Bollywood movers, shakers and strugglers featured in his book,

MARK BENNINGTON has become a local. Since his first visit to India in 2010, the 47-year-old American photographer has mastered the all-purpose Indian head nod; punctuates his sentences with “na” or “ya” (but not “bro”, not yet); and since he’s made Mumbai his home, hung out with Bollywood stars. His book, Living the Dream: The Life of the ‘Bollywood’ Actor (Harpercollins), was published last month, a project that was in the making for nearly seven years. Sitting at a cafe in Versova, Mumbai, Bennington chats about taking pictures, being the new Tom Alter and his new project. Excerpts from a conversation:

You’ve shot people across the Bollywood board — stars, strugglers and those in between. How did you pick your subjects?

My idea was to get people who would represent all aspects of the spectrum. There are actors and then there are moneymaking machines. So, there’s Salman Khan who represents the Khans; Dev Anand, Dharmendra and Jeetendra represent the older generation; Deepti Naval and the late Om Puri for parallel cinema and so on. Rajkummar Rao and Swara Bhaskar were starting out when I shot them, and they’re playing leads in films today. I wanted people on the periphery such as Bobby Darling, Rakhi Sawant, and street performers like Gabbar Singh, as well. That was super important to me, to have that balance.

Some of the pictures seem candid, like Bhaskar’s or Ranbir Kapoor’s, compared to Kareena Kapoor's or Alia Bhatt’s photographs.

I feel the opposite way. Everybody I shot knew there was a camera around them. Take Ranbir, for instance, it looks candid but it’s not — I can tell that he’s looking in that direction but it’s almost like giving me a shot. The Kareena photo is a picture of the diva. The shots set themselves up, and I’m just there to take them.

Is there anybody else you wish you could have photographed?

Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan said no; so did Amitabh Bachchan. I would have loved to shoot Kajol — DDLJ was the first Bollywood movie I watched — but she wasn’t available. I really wanted to shoot Johnny Lever but he refused as well. I wish I could have shot Amrish Puri, but he’d passed away five years before I reached Mumbai. There is one star who said he’d let me shoot him if his was the cover image of the book. I can’t tell you who (laughs); there’s no ‘off the record’ in Bollywood.

Fine. You were a successful TV show actor yourself. How did professional photography happen to you?

I saw Saturday Night Fever three times when I was eight and loved it. When I turned 18, I moved to New York and joined the New Actor’s Workshop; I did a lot of theatre. Then I moved to Los Angeles, got a good agent and manager and started getting steady work in TV shows like NYPD Blue, V.I.P. and Star Trek: Voyager.

My grandfather was an amateur photographer and he left me all these cameras and lenses after he died. I was 33 when I began to tinker with them. I started taking photos of my friends and put a book together. Within six months, I was making a living as a headshot photographer. In 2009, I arrived in Delhi on New Year’s Eve and then came to Mumbai and started this project.

You made your Bollywood debut in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015). Do you think you could be the new Tom Alter, play all the White parts in Hindi films?

I played Deputy Commissioner Wilkie. It was a two-day shoot in the middle of my honeymoon in Goa. I shot Tom Alter at Prithvi Theatre for the book right before I was leaving for Kolkata and I said, ‘Hey Tom, I’m going to be the next Tom Alter’. And he said, ‘Be my guest’.

What are you working on now?

Another book. It’s called Mi Mumbai. I’m taking photographs of Bombay people now, from all sections of society.