A feeling of confusion is always part of the experience of viewing films about the making of films — think of Truffaut’s Day for Night. This enjoyable bewilderment of not quite being able to tell fiction from reality on the sets of a film is also part of looking at Nemai Ghosh’s black-and-white photographs of Satyajit Ray making his films. Ghosh has described himself as “shadowing” Ray from Goopy Gyne to the last films, through every stage of the film-making process and at the expense of his own family life and savings. This has resulted in an immense and invaluable archive of around 95,000 negatives. A small selection of prints from these negatives is now part of the Delhi NGMA collection, and was shown recently in Calcutta as Satyajit Ray: From Script to Screen at the Rabindranath Tagore Centre, ICCR.

Ghosh’s photographs relentlessly track Ray through the mind-boggling range of his genius. So his overwhelming physical presence, together with its effect on those around him and his capacity for chameleonic transformation, is what captivates the photographer most. But in the process, Ghosh’s pictures also compel the viewer, who is not in a hurry and not blinded to everything beside the Rayness of Ray, to reflect on photography’s relationship to fiction, history and time. In unforgettable images of Ray directing Bimala and Nikhilesh in Ghare Baire or Samit Bhanja and Simi Garewal in Aranyer Din Ratri, Ghosh captures him not only as a director but also as an inhabitant of the fictions that are being so fabulously put together in the films. Bending over Bhanja’s naked back, which, in turn, covers Simi’s apparently topless body, and teaching the actor how to caress Simi’s forehead with a finger while making love to her in the woods, Ray becomes part of the erotic drama in Ghosh’s photograph, just as he becomes the third, almost diabolic, presence in Bimala and Nikhilesh’s marriage in another photograph.

These theatrical threesomes are not just the creation of Ghosh’s camera, but are testimonies to how Ray always managed to embody in his own person the distinctive ethos of each film while he was making it: the enchantment of Goopy Gyne, the thrill and the comedy of Sonar Kella, the urbanity of Seemabadhha and Aranyer Din Ratri, or the fineness of reverence for another artist in The Inner Eye. He ‘became’ each film, irresistibly drawing everybody around him into its peculiar world. What also unfolds in these photographs is the amusing story of a kind of visual stalking — how the photographer gradually imbibes his subject’s distinctive ways of seeing, using his subject’s eye to look at the subject himself. Ghosh and Ray are not just photographer and subject in this obsessive body of work, but also pupil and master, mirror and reflection. So what we get is Ray continually being held in various photographic versions of his own cinematic aesthetic.

But a more historically minded viewer will also discover other riches in these photographs. If you want to trace the evolution of the technology and culture of film-making in India, then the construction of the sets, the lighting, the editing and sound-recording machines, among many other traces of vanished or vanishing things or practices captured in these pictures, will draw your attention. There are tricks of history, like the graffito in Ray’s hand, saying “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun — CPI(ML)” in the examination-hall set for Jana Aranya (1975). Discovering, and then lingering with, odd and telling details are also curiously satisfying — some of the titles on his bookshelves, the leatherwork on his chappal straps, or the tangle of film-roll at the foot of an editing machine now long gone out of use.

Interspersed with the smaller prints are a few really large ones that seem to abstract Ray from these teeming, historical worlds of making and playing, and place him in another theatre of a more colossal solitude. This is an inner life of reading, listening, writing, sketching and thought, lived out in the study of his apartment on Bishop Lefroy Road, at once spartan and crammed with the diverse materials of his versatility. The great, open windows that surround him in this room, and what looks in the photographs like a large framed map of the world on one of its walls, make this the Home into which the World was allowed — at once grandly expansive and formidably private. To be able to enter that space with a camera, sometimes on a quiet evening, and have the nerve to take photographs was perhaps, in itself, a heroic achievement.

The appalling quality of mounting and curation in this show — the pictures crowded together and hanging all askew, errors in the captions corrected clumsily with a ball pen — was the saddest evidence of how the splendid perfectionism of Ray’s art has become a thing of the past in his own city.