When a youthful Alexandre de Mortemart was presented with a Leica analogue camera by a Chilean copper mining magnate, little did the schoolboy know that a mighty oak would grow from a tiny acorn. “A friend of my mother was a wealthy Chilean gentleman who owned copper mines and fled the Allende-led government in Chile, which nationalised all his mines. He took refuge in Switzerland, where he put his kids in boarding school in Zug, where I also went between 1975 and 1977. He was passionate about photography and gave me one of his cameras,” recalls Alexandre.
Alexandre descends from the House of Rochechouart de Mortemart, one of the oldest and most prestigious noble families of France, best known in the 17th Century for producing prominent courtiers, including Francoise-Athenais (Madame de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV), and her brother, the Duke of Vivonne.
The tall, 63-year-old Frenchman with an infectious smile was born in Paris. After 10 years of junior school in the city, followed by four years of German language studies in Switzerland, Alexandre graduated in economic studies at the university. Passionate about Japan, he started learning the language and decided to go to Tokyo to perfect it. In Tokyo, he spent four years working for a French fragrance manufacturer, and for the first time, seriously pursued photography, which he had discovered earlier. Upon returning to Paris in the mid-1980s, he started to collaborate with French newspapers such as Le Figaro, Liberation, Le Monde, and Elle and Vogue magazines till the early-1990s. “This is when I ventured into the cinema and started directing shorts and documentaries. Not making a living out of those passions, I started working for the French prime minister’s office in the Intelligence Department,” he said.
“Five years passed, and luck came my way with a chance to meet a young beautiful Bengali lady, Rima Sen, whom I married a few years later. Moving to Calcutta in 1998 was a great change, where I continued to work, advising international companies, some of whom I had met during my days in the government. The job was intense. There was hardly any time for photography. In 2015, I finally decided to change my life and return to photography. That is when I discovered the city of Calcutta. And since then, I live with an analogue camera between Paris, Calcutta, and other wonderful places in the world,” said Alexandre, whose first book is the Quest series (2016-2019), a collection of black-and-white photographs capturing individuals immersed in their routines amidst the anonymity of large cities.
Now, he darts through the maze of streets of Sovabazar in the early morning light, almost every dawn. The locals know him as the man with the red camera. Those photographs shot in North Calcutta in 2016-24 became the book, Mystical, his journey over the last eight years, which was launched at Paris Photo in 2025. A recent exhibition of this work took place at Gallery 127 in Marrakesh.
“Behind each face is a story,” says Alexandre. His subject is not the usual meat and potatoes of the rich traditional homes of elite families who have been holding Durga Pujas over generations in marbled courtyards opulently bedecked with chandeliers and European masters on their walls from the colonial period. What makes Mystical an intriguing, complex and multifaceted book is the way he uses his own metaphors as tools to tell his story. Thus, the river becomes a gentle presence through the images in this book. It is often present in the quietude and grieving by the burning ghats, sometimes a metaphor of migration pops up like a jack in the box through the many frames of birds on wires or in flight, underlining the provenance of the residents of Sovabazar, many of whom often eke out a living from toil and sweat; here it is a level playing ground for men and women.
Most of the faces he captures are of thelawallas, people who perhaps live on one meal a day. The photographer is aware that it is a rich and rare privilege that the local resident, who has a history in this northern part of the city, is not always welcoming to being captured on camera. But it is to Alexandre’s credit that, over the years of persisting quietly without making himself unduly important, has brought about a sense of trust among these people. They are, in one word, marginalised, those who live on the fringes, “yet have a great sense of humour and empathy”, remarks Alexandre.
It is the sense of humans who suffer greatly and yet nobly that attracted and continues to attract Alexandre. “For instance, it is remarkable how the bandwallas who play during weddings and other festivities always have a smile on their faces when in fact life’s sordid challenges of hunger and space are always a cause for concern to them,” he adds. The wit underlying the French photographer’s exchange with the women who are young mothers, or going about their chores, or selling fabric, is understated but strong. “They are there one minute and gone the next. You have to be very quick to capture the moment,” he says.
Alexandre’s Mystical has a particular frame, one of three consecutive photos he had shot near a brothel in Sealdah. One that stirs the viewer’s imagination is where a man and a presumed sex worker are working out the payment amount. One moment, there is desire, hope, and excitement, and the next, there is rage and breakdown of joy. “That is the human condition. It is fleeting from moment to moment, and that is what is most exciting about the way photography captures the moment,” he states.
A story oft-told through the pages of Mystical is how a mannequin from its heydays as the most desirable bachelor suffers the vagaries of the passage of time, losing its garments, its limbs, and its posture through the Covid years. The photographer is still good friends with the tailor who keeps the weather-beaten mannequin in front of his shop. “Seeking the truth under the surface is what my photography tries to do,” Alexandre says.
The photographer from Paris with his 50-year-old camera is still clicking and making photos the purist, classical way — shooting rolls of film, and developing them in a Paris laboratory. The red camera has many more stories to tell.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College. She curates and anchors the Rising Asia Literary Circle