Ranjith Kally, our
Given little credit for his bountiful work, the photographer is a light to today’s photojournalists
Ihad forgotten how verdant Durban is: how lusciously green and warm it remains even in the winter. From the airport on the north coast, boundless fields of sugar cane stand at attention, giving way, gradually, to shacks, houses and factories as the freeway heads towards the Indian suburb of Reservoir Hills where the funeral of photographer Ranjith Kally was to be held.
It’s been almost 15 years since I left Reservoir Hills, where I grew up and spent more than half my life and, as the car approached the Clare Estate Hindu Crematorium on the banks of the Umgeni River, I tried to remember how many of my own family I’d said goodbye to in the same hall as a boy.
Just next to the crematorium is the Papwa Sewgolum Municipal Golf Course. Named after the caddy who taught himself how to play golf with a second-hand club, Sewgolum is commemorated in Kally’s pictures when he beat Gary Player in 1965. Player questioned the veracity of Sewgolum’s scorecard before finally accepting defeat and when he received his trophy outside, Player looked on from within the clubhouse, where the Indian golfer was not allowed to enter.
Just outside the crematorium, an uncle has set up shop on the back of an old bakkie, a tarpaulin serving as a makeshift verandah. He sells cans of cold drink while aunties in pristine saris glide past on their way to the hall where the Hindu mantra of aum namashivaya echoes as a dirge for the departed.
A dog lies in a nearby dry flowerbed, kicking up dust as its tail wags, and a group of men stand in a patch of nearby shade smoking cigarettes and exchanging memories of Kally and his work and life. It was a scene that would not have been out of place in one of Kally’s photographs of Durban’s yesteryears.
Kally was born in Isipingo, near Durban, in 1925. His father, Kallicharan, like his father before him, worked in the sugar-cane fields as an overseer. At age 14, Kally left school to work in a shoe factory in Durban to supplement the family income. Seven years later, he found his first camera at a jumble sale for sixpence.
That was the beginning of a career that spanned over 60 years. Singularly prolific, there is perhaps no photographer who has documented Durban as thoroughly or as consistently as Kally. A self-taught photographer, he got magazines from the Royal Photographic Society of London and learned the principles of exposure and composition by trying to replicate the techniques he saw in their pages.
As one of the photographers at Drum magazine’s Durban bureau, between 1956 and 1985, is where Kally made much of his best work: documenting life in the African and Indian townships of Durban, covering their social events and celebrities and taking portraits of the leaders of the antiapartheid movements.
His work during this most creative period of his career is marked by a unique subtlety, devoid of ostentation and with a tenderness, most especially in his portraiture, that only one who came from poverty himself could see within those denigrated by it.
His portfolio is perhaps a reflection of the man himself who, says his daughter Dr Pavitra Pillay during a telephone interview, was a “humble, happy-go-lucky man who loved life and stood for justice. There was a sincerity in my dad’s work, he wanted to tell the truth, to tell the story as it was and he had a genuine interest in the wellbeing of others.”
“Growing up we had an improvised darkroom at our home and sometimes I would go in there with him while he was working but I wouldn’t be able to leave until he was done because light would come in. He would take so long sometimes …” she reminisces, a small laugh breaking through the lingering sadness in her voice. “He was so passionate and meticulous.”
Such values are often conspicuously absent in modern photojournalism, which so often prioritises the sensational over the sensitive, immediacy over intimacy. Depth has been sacri-