A work by Bivas Bhattacharjee; picture of Bivas by Amit Datta below

Bivas Bhattacharjee’s father may have been one of Bengal’s leading painters, but he loved the camera as well and used it often enough to look at things from a “different viewpoint”.

The Herwitzes, known for their famous collection of Indian art in the US, had gifted Bikash Bhattacharjee a Nikon, and he would turn shutterbug whenever he went out of town. Those familiar with the works of Bikash Bhattacharjee, who died in December 2006, may be familiar with little Bivas’s face as well. Child Bivas’s face appeared in his father’s graphic prints and Boy series of paintings.

His father had gifted him a Snapper camera when he was only five or six, and whenever Bhattacharjee pere bought rolls of film for himself, he would buy some for this little boy too. The 29-year-old has already held exhibitions of his photographic work, and his group show opened at the Academy of Fine Arts on Thursday. The other participants are Pradip Muhuri, Saptarshi Das and Susant Nayak, his friends employed in the IT sector.

In the beginning, Bivas would imitate his father’s photographs. As he grew up he graduated to a Fujica camera.

He says he was studying economics at St Xavier’s College but was never interested in it. Later, he went to University College Falmouth in the UK where he did a three-year course in photography. “Rather than teach photography they bring out the artist in you,” says Bivas. “We had to analyse and explain why we wanted to take a certain shot. Those were three years when I was actually educated.”

Now he uses a Nikon D 200 but says at his art college he had to learn everything from manual prints, printing on canvas and cyanotype. Now he has a set-up for taking out archival quality prints for professionals.

He takes a certain shot and transforms it, sometimes in a way that there are barely any traces left of the original image. He does not mind manipulating images with Photoshop. “I like to express certain feelings through my works and they are not meant to be representational,” says Bivas.