Thanks to a West Windsor resident who is a longtime friend of an Indian photo archivist an exhibit will soon open featuring works by Kulwant Roy, a photojournalist who worked through the pre and post-independence era of modern India.
The resident, Hasan R. Sayed, will display the works at his new gallery, Studio Shraza, at 1800 East State Street in Hamilton, with an opening reception Friday, February 27.
The exhibit is titled “History In the Making: Visual Archives of Kulwant Roy.” Roy’s photos and images remained forgotten in boxes for more than 25 years after his death in 1984. Aditya Arya, the curator of the exhibition and a photographer himself, inherited them and began cataloging the images. Arya has lent Sayed original certified prints of the Kulwant Roy archives.
“The exhibition displays some of the very rare negatives and prints of Mahatma Gandhi, recently discovered and restored,” says Sayed. “Some of the key black and white photos from the freedom struggle reinforce these images as the icons on our mental altars, which we Indians have been trained to feel reverently about as our country’s founding fathers.”
Born in the city of Cambay, the state of Gujarat, in India, Sayed’s family migrated to Mumbai when he was eight year old. Sayed’s siblings include his brother, an engineer with the largest oil corporation in India, and a sister, who has a PhD in zoology and is the dean of an English school.
The photography opening was scheduled to coincide with the eve of Indian independence in January but Sayed’s mother died in India two months ago. His father is a retired geologist who worked in the petroleum industry.
“My father would often travel to destinations within India for survey and production purposes,” Sayed says. “Traveling with him gave me wonderful exposure to the diversity of Indian subcontinent.”
Sayed was fascinated by the photographers who accompanied his father for the geological surveys and seeing them develop films onsite for technical purposes. “One photographer taught me to build my own pinhole camera and to experiment with it,” he says. “Photography in the 1970s was an expensive hobby and our economical status prohibited such indulgence. I never thought that one day I would actually take this as a profession.”
He learned to write certificates with a calligraphic pen and ink to earn extra money. During a program where Sayed’s handwritten certificates were being awarded, he was noticed by a photographer who wanted to photograph him working. “We became good friends and I would hang out in his studio as an assistant and learned the basics of photography,” he says. “This gave me insight into darkroom and traditional methods deployed in developing and printing photographs.”
Sayed purchased his first used Leica professional camera in 1985 and began taking pictures of his family and friends. “Street photography intrigued me very much but there were hardly any schools in Mumbai which would teach photography as main course,” he says. He wrote to Kodak India and they suggested Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai. “I learned the foundation of visual arts, including photography, at the school,” he says.
In 1993 Mumbai had serial bomb blasts that shook the city and Sayed dropped out of college to help law enforcement officers. “Destruction, deaths, and debris, which I had observed at the Bombay Stock Exchange building, less than a mile from my school, changed my view towards life completely,” he says. “The incident of serial blasts made me a seeker and I read the books on theology to understand what prompts a human being to terrorize, kill, and destroy other fellow beings in the name of faith and religion. Reading through the scriptures of the world, I found none of the faiths preached violence. I found solace in the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and some of the other modern Indian spiritual leaders.”
Sayed studied print graphics at the Institute of Digital Graphics in 1994 and began working as a computer graphic artist for the Times of India in 1995.
“Since my childhood, I have been inspired by two people, Gandhi and Albert Einstein,” he says. “I never in my life expected that one day I would be residing less than a mile away from Princeton University where Mr. Einstein taught and spent his last days.”
He was introduced to street photography and began traveling around the city to meet people from various walks of life. “Everyone is a story and everyone is a camera,” he says.
He later learned digital art management. “While digital photography was taking over the traditional imaging, plenty of films remained neglected in the archives of every media house and syndication agencies,” Sayed says. “My job was to digitize them, making them searchable over intranet/internet.”
As a photo editor for the Arab Media Group based in Dubai, Sayed traveled throughout OPEC nations. He also worked in conflict zone photography funded by a Swedish group interested in learning how imaging equipment would fare in harsh conditions.
Sayed and his wife, Shilpa, went to school together in India but parted in 1986 after the 10th grade. “She opted for science and became an engineer, while I pursued my creative endeavor,” he says. “In 2008 we met again at the airport when Mumbai was under attack. I was at the airport in the arrivals section and saw Shilpa not in good condition. She was on a flight from Newark that had just landed. I had her immigrations and customs cleared and sent her to a safer part of the city for medical help.”
Shilpa had migrated to the United States close to 25 years ago. She works at IBM, as well as acting as the administrator of the art gallery. The couple traveled to Plainsboro in 2011 and purchased a home in the Canal Pointe section of West Windsor the following year.
“I am indeed very fortunate to find Sayed, who is philosophically evolved and spiritually actualized,” she says. “As I evolved spiritually and drifted personally, I also realized that my journey is the destination and my goal. Life brought us together in 2008, on the fateful night when Mumbai was attacked by the terrorists. We both were drifting in life and fate brought us together again.”
Says Sayed: “I would like to make up for lost time. I have stayed away from my creative endeavor for a long time so now I will devote my time to art and photography.”
