Deb Mukharji’s photograph taken at Ravan Hrad, to be exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts from January 31

Deb Mukharji’s Canon could be his paintbrush. Many of his photographs could easily be mistaken for paintings. But Mukharji, who retired as Indian ambassador to Nepal in 2001, insists his is the passion of an amateur, and laughs off any such praise.

Calcutta will get a glimpse of Kailash to the Bay of Bengal, as Mukharji sees it, in an exhibition from January 31 till February 6, at the Academy of Fine Arts. The Himalayas are clearly the 62-year-old’s weakness. “I don’t want to run down the Alps,” smiles the Indian Foreign Service officer, who has been posted in Switzerland, Islamabad, Germany, Delhi, Nigeria, San Francisco and Bangladesh, “but once you have seen the Himalayas, everything else totally lacks depth.”

During his tenure as consul-general in San Francisco, Alaska came under his charge, and there he found some of the same “solemnity” that he feels puts the Himalayas in a class apart.

The display, titled ‘The Wandering Lens’ will include 65 pictures taken in Tibet, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Garwhal, Kumaon, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Bangladesh, and will be inaugurated by filmmaker Goutam Ghosh. The oldest of these was taken in 1960, in Gangotri. The black-and-white frame is of his trekking partner on a mountain trail, standing under a pine tree. The tree is almost white, because of the orange filter used, and is one of the finest in the remarkable collection. Another, of two men with their horses in front of Ravan Hrad, near Kailash (1993), is so much like a painting that it has often been mistaken for a manipulated image. It is one of his favourites.

Mukharji got his hands on his first camera at age nine. It was a box camera, to which he was introduced by his elder brother. He would develop the pictures at home. That lasted him four years, till he moved on to a more advanced one. His main subject was family, till he went for his first mountain walk in the Garwhal.

Reluctant to make the shift from film to digital, Mukharji looks down at his 20-year-old Canon lovingly. He recalls the time he dropped his older one, purchased in 1969, in eight-foot-deep salt waters in Ireland. “The Irish like Indians because we both fought the British. So, a fisherman offered to retrieve the camera for me,” he remembers. The camera was repaired in Calcutta, and most of the black-and-white shots at the exhibition have been taken with this trusty companion.

Retirement a couple of years ago has not changed the Delhi-based gentleman’s plans a bit. “I hope to keep travelling as long as I can walk,” says Mukharji, who was born and raised in Ghatshila, before heading to St Stephen’s College, Delhi, after which he joined the foreign service in 1964. Rupa will publish a book he is writing on his “walks in Nepal”, which will include a selection of his pictures as well. Kailash, which he has visited thrice, will be the subject of his next book.