Capturing Stars: Bengali Actresses Through the Camera of Nemai Ghosh

This essay explores the rich archive of photographer Nemai Ghosh whose production stills on the sets of Satyajit Ray kept his cinema alive in popular memory. While it might appear that Ghosh was overwhelmed by the vision of Satyajit Ray, the essay explores how the documentary impulse in his work created continuity as well as rupture with the cinema of Ray and others in Bengal. Nemai Ghosh’s forte lay in capturing candid moments of actors just before and after filming on the sets. These interstitial moments caught between the vision of the director and the photographer shooting a production still could be used to tease out other deeper meanings about star personas. As we look through Nemai Ghosh’s larger body of work, particularly at images which may not have found public circulation as film stills, we see other kinds of mediations between the photographer, the camera and his subjects. By extricating still frames out of motion, Ghosh’s photographs invite us to contemplate certain tensions between female actors, their roles and their extra cinematic lives. Recollections of these stars are layered by stories, anecdotes and popular myths. In this essay, I explore what it might mean to look back at Nemai Ghosh’s images through the prism of these overlapping memories.