Interview with Manav Lakra

Manav Lakra is a photographer, who lives in Kolkata. I happened to meet him at Orkut. He also runs a community at Orkut called “The Tribal Blood”. Finding his creative photographs led me to ask him to share his passion with joharadivasi.com readers.

Livio: Johar Manav, how are you doing these days?

Manav: Johar… I’m doing good and just trying to keep up with the pace of my hasty life.

Livio: Tell us something about yourself and your passion?

Manav: Hmmm… That’s the question I hate to answer. Well, I’m a very ordinary guy who loves travelling and meeting new people. I grew up in a middle-class family, in Calcutta, with many dreams and ambitions. So I was very confused regarding what I actually wanted to become in life. I somehow managed to clear my CA-INTER examination along with my graduation in Calcutta. Then, as an articled clerk, I got trained under a Chartered Accountant for 1 year. But later, instead of continuing my articleship, I went to Pune for my post-graduation in Management. After completing the 2 years course, I returned back to my city and got recruited in a Private Firm. But that’s not the only thing I’m actually born for. My real life is way beyond the horizon of my official life, where there’s no bondage, no boss, no boundary and no business. It’s the life of capturing all the emotions and feelings with my camera and store them in the deepest core of my heart.

Livio: Ok let me ask you something about your photography. Is it your profession or just a hobby?

Manav: As a kid, I used to involve myself in many artistic and creative hobbies like painting, sketching portraits, writing short poems and even imitating people. When my dad saw the artist within me, he gifted me my first black and white camera on my 13th birthday. I remember the first picture which I clicked with it. It was of my pet dog. The snap, along with the camera, is still with me. I started taking pictures of whatever I could find interesting. From insects to people, from trees to pebbles, I wanted everything in my collection. Most of my pocket money was spent in buying film rolls and as I grew older, I started taking photography more seriously. At the age of 16, I bought a new Canon PowerShot A5 camera with all my scholarship money. My mom got very angry with this but my dad supported me. After completing my High School, I travelled to many far-flung locations in India, with my camera, to experience other cultures, meet people from other communities and see the beauty as well as the ugliness of the world. I, along with my friends, wanted to explore the whole of western India and so I started my digital photography while sojourning Rajasthan, Gujarat and Goa. The graceful people, stunning landscapes and ravishing colours impressed me so much that I never got tired of taking their snapshots. My friends liked my work and suggested me to sell them. I took their advice and created a personal photo gallery on the internet to share with my friends and relatives. It was really a surprising moment when I got my first request for a print from an unknown person, who just had a glimpse of my photographs. Thus, a serious passion started evolving into a business.

I was badly in need of money and so I began selling my images and fine art prints for both commercial and editorial use. But I couldn’t continue my business for more than 20 months due to the heavy pressure of my Graduation studies and the CA course. Then again I got busy with my post-graduation, during which I got no scope to take photography as a profession. Then I finally decided to stop this selling business permanently and to take it just as a passionate hobby. Today, even though I’ve got the time and scope, I don’t feel like starting it all over again because I feel that my photography is the bible of memories, feelings and emotions which should never be exchanged in terms of money. It is meant to be shared in order to inculcate the veiled and veritable side of life in the minds of people.

Livio: Have you done some courses on photography or self learned person?

Manav: Well good photography isn’t that easy as it seems to be. One definitely needs to learn the right techniques to master this art. For that very reason, even I had to enroll in a photography school to pursue a basic black and white darkroom course. But its learning atmosphere was not as good as I had expected. So after 2 months I left it and set up a darkroom in the storehouse of my own house to experiment with the classical black and white printing. I kept on practicing and innovating heterogeneous ways of taking the ingeniously realistic shots and always believed that only practice could make a man perfect. But everyone knows that nobody is perfect in this world. So I’m still learning and trying to grasp something more whenever I trip the camera’s shutter.

Livio: I have seen some of your works, they are very creative, tell me do you choose theme while taking those shots or naturally it comes to you?

Manav: Thanks a lot for appreciating my work. Yes, I do select themes and subjects according to time, mood and penchant. In my early days, I was mainly a nature observer. I used to spend hours capturing the beauty of nature. But gradually I got inclined towards people and their eccentric lives. With the help of my camera, I try to highlight the hidden feelings and sentiments of people which need to come out to reveal the hardcore truth of real life. I want to show that even a smiling face can have a heart full of sorrow and how an old man struggles with life to live for tomorrow. For the last few years I’ve been trying to focus mainly on the poverty in India to present the life of the poor to the urban population. I like kids a lot and so you’ll find most of my recent photographs portraying street children and the kids from rural areas. These little ones have so much innocence in their twinkling eyes which cannot be expressed in words. It can only be envisaged by the visualizing minds.

Livio: Share a tip with our readers: What a photographer should always remember to bring out creative work?

Manav: Anyone can be a photographer but firstly you need to have a visionary and imaginative mind to excel in this art. Only buying an advanced camera will not improve your photography. No matter how high-tech your camera is, you still need to be responsible for getting it to the right place at the right time and pointing it in the right direction to get your desired photo. Your subject may not be beautiful but if you have the power of seeing, thinking and taking interest, your photo can be miraculously beautiful. It’s sad when I see how most of the people waste all their time blaming poor results on their camera, instead of spending that time in learning how to manipulate and interpret light. One should always remember that balancing the light in the photo is one of most important things to take care of. When you use your camera to automatically choose aperture and shutter speed, your camera uses the built in light meter and measures how much light is being reflected to the camera. But that’s not enough. You should also think about the direction and angle in which the light enters the frame, how intense the light should be, what will be the colour of the light, how to adjust the contrast of your photo and what kind of shadows you prefer. The light used in a photograph can always decide whether that picture will be dazzling or dreadful. If you keep experimenting with different ways of using light, you will find that you can get very interesting results.

Livio: Who are your great influences?

Manav: When I was a kid, my dad used to take me and my elder brother to the Indian Museum where I loved watching the b/w photographs and paintings depicting the portraits of common people, tribal labourers, freedom fighters and other striking people. My genre of photography is somewhat inspired by those portraits. Besides that, there are many unpopular photographers who have really influenced me by their extraordinary work. Some of them are Soffia Gisladóttir, Stefano Corso aka ‘Pensiero‘ and Sergio Recabarren. There’s only one word for them – ‘Great’.

Livio: Ok let’s talk about your community at Orkut. You have created a community called “The Tribal Blood” tell us something about it?

Manav: Well… I created ‘The Tribal Blood’ community in 2006, mainly for the tribal youth. At that time, two other Tribal Communities** were already existing on Orkut where I found people just playing games rather than discussing important tribal issues. It was then when I felt the need for creating a new tribal community where only such topics would be discussed which were related to tribal matters, problems and their solutions. At first, nobody came to know about it for a long time. So I had to take the initiative myself for promoting it on Orkut and inviting as many tribals as I could to join. Gradually, more people came to know about it and the membership number began to increase.

This community mainly focuses on the present problems which are faced by the tribal society of India. People from different tribal castes and backgrounds come here and share their hearts with everyone. And I believe that their opinions, advices, feelings and thoughts are really helping our tribal world in some way. Initially I was thinking of creating a tribal website but later I had to drop my plan because nobody could match the fame and eminence of Mr. Livio Kujur’s great website. So I preferred using Orkut, where I saw thousands of adivasi people (mainly youth) busy socializing with the world. It was a good decision for me to bring tribals closer to each other and tie them with the bond of love, friendship and unity in the best possible way. Recently, I’ve also created a blog with the same name, where we share and contribute latest tribal news, articles and information about our people. You can visit it at the-tribal-blood.blogspot.com . I don’t know whether I’ll be successful or not, but I’m trying my best to do something fruitful for my tribal society with the help of my Community and Blog. Let the Tribal Blood flow for ever.

** (These two communities have improved a lot these days with regards to their members’ discussions and contributions for the improvement of tribals.)

Livio: Lets talk about our Tribe “Adivasi“, what does our society need to learn to progress in life?

Manav: The most important thing which our society needs is to provide the helping hand to our poor folks. The well-to-do tribals should always take the initiative to support our underprivileged people in rural areas. After getting good jobs, we get so busy with our own life that we often forget our responsibilities towards the upliftment of our tribal society. But we must remember that our indigent tribal people also deserve the same amenities, prestige and status that we have achieved in life. So without waiting for the Government and the NGOs to ameliorate our people, we ourselves should individually do as much as we can to improve the economic and social condition of our poor brothers and sisters. Until and unless we tribals have the desire, eagerness and enthusiasm to help our own people, it will be very difficult for the whole Adivasi Society to progress.

Livio: How do you define ultimate success?

Manav: For me, there is no ultimate success. The more successful we are in life, the more we need to learn to get even better.

Livio: Any message for our readers?

Manav:

It’s easy to be proud of being a tribal,

But it’s tough to prove it.

Don’t be just a part of our society,

Try your best to improve it.

Livio: Nice knowing you Manav. Thank you for sparing your time to answer those questions. We wish you all the best in your life.

Manav: It’s all my pleasure. Thank you.

Some of Manav’s photographs: