BENGALURU: Across a career spanning over four decades, photojournalist Pablo Bartholomew has worked for many prestigious organisations, including the Red Cross, Gamma-Liaison Agency and more across the globe as a still photographer, racking up accolades, including the World Press Photo award, Padma Shri, and Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1976, 2013 and 2014, respectively.
Over the weekend, Bartholomew’s collection of early works were exhibited by the Barefoot College Tilonia as part of their 50th-anniversary celebrations. “The exhibits are in two parts: old archive materials going back to the ’70s, from a time when I first went to the Social Work in Research Centre (SWRC), which is now Barefoot College,” he says. “Then the work from experiments that SWRC undertook.” An early advocate of communication through photography, the Barefoot College would equip villagers who would then document their lives. “They would build wooden film strips and project those images. It was like the instagram of that day,” he shares.
Having gotten into photography at a young age after quitting high school, Bartholomew was inspired by the works of his father Richard Bartholomew, a leading art critic, artist and photographer of the newly-Independent India. “After I got kicked out of high school, I didn’t have anything else to do but take up the craft of photography. My father was an important source of inspiration. By watching, through trial and error, I got into photography,” says the 66-year-old.
Bartholomew faced social ostracisation for being ‘a dangerous influence’ on his peers, only to be celebrated for his work after he won the World Press Photo award at 19. “The friendships I made didn’t die, but my school principal held a parent meeting and told other parents that I was a bad influence on their children,” he recollects. “Later, the same principal was singing a different tune. ‘Oh, look at this boy. He’s been able to do it on his own. He has been, you know, he’s a shining example.’ When you succeed, everybody wants to embrace you.”
Despite digital photography having changed the landscape, Bartholomew has remained faithful to shooting with film. It allows him to stay disciplined given the obvious limitations of technology. “I continue to shoot film and have it processed and printed. The discipline of shooting film is different to shooting digitally. Digital cameras allow you to shoot a vast number of images quickly and review them later.
But with film, you can only shoot a limited number of images and you must be more precise with your camera settings. So that forces you to structure and plan things,” he shares, adding that the convenience of digital photography tends to make one lazy, since so much more could be accomplished in post-production.
On the other hand, he hasn’t shunned digital tech altogether. He still uses image processing tools extensively but explains that he only does so in a limited manner. “I don’t do anything close to what people do with it. You need to discipline yourself in a certain way, so you are true to whatever your thought processes are,” he says.