Shutterbug focuses on giving historic images a new life
Zaidi creates digital versions of photos captured in Lahore studio 100 years ago
Before Shahid Zaidi was born, before his homeland was an independent country, his father opened a portrait studio and captured the nation’s emerging history.
His father, Syed Mohammad Ali Zaidi, captured a Hindu couple in 1939. The man wore a conservative double-breasted suit, hair slicked, while the woman sported a sari, with earrings dangling and bangles, the exact colors eluding the blackand-white negative.
The next year he captured a Muslim couple, listed as Mr and Mrs Mohammad Abbas, the bride in a shimmer-trimmed shalwar kameez and a matha patti, an ornamental headpiece, and the groom resplendent in a qulla, a wedding turban.
Word spread about his studio, and Syed Mohammed Ali Zaidi’s customers began to include the elite of the new nation of Pakistan. He photographed Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a lawyer turned politician who became the modern country’s founder. He photographed Liaquat Ali Khan, the first prime minister, who was assassinated in 1951.
Shahid Zaidi, 79, wants to preserve that history. He has assembled a small team to create digital versions of the images his father began capturing at his studio in Lahore 91 years ago. He aims to put the complete collection online so that families can find their ancestors and explore Pakistan’s coming-of-age.
“It’s my responsibility,” said Zaidi.
It won’t be easy. The studio, called Zaidis Photographers,
houses an extensive archive of around a half-million negatives. The elder Zaidi opened the studio in 1930, when he rented a piece of prime real estate on The Mall, a Britishera thoroughfare in Lahore.
Zaidi junior left for London as a young man to study film. When his cousin, who’d been running the studio, called him in the 1980s to ask him to take over the business, he felt he had to return. “There was something in me telling me, ‘You’ve got to go back.’”