Fashion photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta died in Alibaug on Sunday of a heart attack. He was in his fifties. Pablo Bartholomew, a Delhi-based photojournalist and friend of Dasgupta’s, pays him a tribute:

A photograph taken by Prabuddha Dasgupta

We met, we didn’t meet. It didn’t matter. The chemistry was always the same. Fun and friendship. Always nudging me to come visit him and Lakshmi in Goa.

And he would tell stories about me. Of how when my family moved out of our flat in Jangpura extension in New Delhi and Prabuddha’s family moved into the same house, he found my abandoned guitar perched on top of a cupboard. Something I never remembered.

His voice was deep like mine… and sometimes some common friends would mistake him for me. The guy had this very slow, cool approach. Everything was very studied and we became close in the late 90s when he had shot the ad with Madhu Sapre and Milind Soman in their birthday suits and keds with a python between them. Someone filed a police complaint and the police were after the models, advertising agency and the photographer.

Strangely, as it happened, Prabuddha felt abandoned. Many people he knew just vanished. He was dropped like a hot potato. And he was fearful that the police might raid his house and want to get hold of the images in question. I offered to take all his negatives and hold them with me till the danger passed and this act of camaraderie made us closer as friends.

This again is an anecdote that he used to tell as a funny story among groups of friends.

The last I stayed with him was last year, just a few days before Christmas, in Goa, and then I saw him briefly earlier this April when both brothers, Pradeep and Prabuddha, put together with the gallery Aakar Prakar this wonderful retrospective of their father Pradosh Dasgupta’s bronze sculptures at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi.

While we met infrequently, he was aloof but generous. I remember him calling me up and saying, ‘Epson is giving me a new printer, would you like my old one?’ Sure, I said to him, and he had it shipped to me in Delhi. I, on my part, recommended him to be on the World Photography Organisation’s jury for 2011 as I was on the jury the year before…

So our exchanges, meetings went on and would have done so in years to come. It came as a shock to hear that he died so suddenly of a heart attack. Fifty-five is no age to pass on.

And now after things have settled, someone will have to assess his work fairly quickly, both his commercial and his personal, and put up a retrospective of his work. Waiting for a 100-year centenary show like the one now showing of his father’s work at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta maybe leaving it too late.