Walking into C. Bros on Arabinda Sarani is stepping into something discreet, sepia-toned, away from the distractions of colour — and not only in photographs. The north Kolkata studio, more than a century old, now restores photographs. Many old photographs hang on the walls. But it is not only the past that is preserved here. A photograph restored by C. Bros is brought stunningly back to life.
Samar Chatterjee, 61, seated behind the counter, runs the studio now. Next to him is Nakul Chatterjee, Samar’s father’s childhood friend. Nakul, 88, has worked here all his life and still comes every day.
Samar shows a faded photocopy of a building, digging the piece of paper out from one of the slightly disorderly wood-and-glass cabinets that line the walls.
“This was Star Theatre once, the first one in Beadon Street,” he said.
Built in 1883, this building was visited by Ramakrishna Paramhamsa. From this small blurred sketch, the studio created an image 10 feet wide and 8 feet in height and richly detailed, which adorns the entrance of the Ramakrishna museum at Belur Math now.
The studio has another bit of the first Star Theatre within it. A giant electric bulb, about five times the size of a regular one, hangs from the ceiling. This was obtained by Samar’s grandfather, who set up the studio at this address in 1916. “It helped when photographs would be taken here,” said Samar.
With some pride but a lot of hesitation, he said that C. Bros was one of the best studios for black and white photographs and is still one of the best for restoration.
“When others cannot restore a photograph, my name comes up,” he laughed.
He is an unassuming man, who speaks with humour, garnishing his speech with exquisite north Kolkata expressions. “Oi ekta ghaater mora achhe (There’s a man who is just about to give up his ghost), people say about me,” he added. He claims at 61, he is very old.
He shows the dramatically restored image of Rani Rashmoni’s residence at Jan Bazar, created merely from a photograph printed in a Ramakrishna centennial year publication of 1936, and another image of the residence of Jadu Mallick.
These two images were also restored for the Ramakrishna museum, along with the Star Theatre one. All the three buildings were visited by Ramakrishna.
The photographs on the walls are mostly of Ramakrishna, Sarada Devi and Vivekananda, most of them original, and of Hindu deities, and also of other spiritual leaders such as Sri Aurobindo and Anandamayi Ma.
The studio had started its journey, almost on a whim, more than a hundred years ago when Kunjabihari Chattopadhyay, the eldest brother of Samar’s grandfather Anadibhushan, found the photograph of a dead person too blurred. It was then a custom to photograph the dead at the crematorium.
“Morar chhobi erokom i hoi (The photographs of the dead are always like that),” he was told. Kunjabihari took up the challenge, got hold of a camera and photographed another deceased person. The image was sharp.
That made him set up shop in Bagbazar in 1912. At that time many would be afraid of being photographed, as that was believed to tempt death. In this part of the world, early photography was a lot about mortality.
C. Bros was named after the Chattopadhyay/Chatterjee Brothers. Anadibhushan caught the camera bug as well and began his career in the abrupt family tradition by taking a picture of acquaintances at Deshbandhu Park one day with his tripod camera, without prior training, and almost failing.
“Photobabu, photo hobe?” he had just been asked. He shifted C. Bros to its current location in 1916, which was then Grey Street, and had to take over its running.
Starting with the “pictures of death”, with the occasional family pictures of progressive and prosperous families, C. Bros became one of the most-well known studios, located in the Kolkata area where everything was then happening, said Samar.
For many years, though, women stayed away from photographs. This changed with Independence, when everything changed, said Samar. Then they even began to walk into the studio. The “sambhandher chhobi”, the photograph of a young woman accompanying a marriage proposal, would become a genre.
After Anadibhushan, Samar’s father Bulai Chattopadhyay, another person who learnt to work the camera on his own, was in charge of the studio. All the studio-owners have been the photographers (Photobabu), picking up photography on their own. “My father was a remarkable photographer,” said Samar. “He knew how to use light.”
That was the key to some extraordinary photographs taken by him in black-and-white, which is as difficult as it is rewarding, he said.
“You have to learn a lot when you are working with film, and with black and white. There is only limited film. There are only two colours,” he added. “Black and white is soft. Digital is bright, the contrast is sharp. You don’t want to look at very bright, colourful things for long. You feel tired. But you can keep looking at old black-and-white photographs,” he said. “They have life.”
“We were famous for our finish,” Samar said. Finish requires an eye for detail, a sensitivity, your mind. “An ‘edit’ on a machine is not the same as ‘finish’,” he said. “We used ‘sauce finish’,” said Samar. He pointed at Nakul. “He was a master at it.”
As David Burnett, the celebrated photo-journalist who photographed the 1979 Iranian revolution, says: “There is definitely something elemental in [black and white] which eliminates so many of the potential distractions (and wonders, alike) that colour is all about. [Black and white]…retains a kind of purity which we respond to without so much study.”
When the wonder is captured, it can dazzle. Samar remembers a photograph in the late Seventies taken by his father on a full moon Lakshmi Puja of the snow-clad Himalaya from Pokhra, Nepal, in natural light. Other photographers would visit the studio to see it, but Samar does not know where it is now, like most other photographs belonging to the studio that he is proud of.
Like the world, C. Bros had to resort to colour, too, in the Eighties, and to digital, in the Nineties. The Eighties were hectic, though, when C. Bros was overwhelmed with “commercial” work, including that of slides, which were used for advertisements on cinema screen. “We would work from 7.30am to 10pm.” At that time C. Bros closed down the space within the studio that is called “studio”, where photographs were taken.
By the late Nineties, everything was colour and digital. Photography had changed fundamentally.
But what survived was what was learned with the eye, with hands and with the mind. “Our skills with black-and-white and finish helped us to adapt very well,” said
Samar. “That is what distinguishes their restoration work now, for which clients come from abroad, too.”
“We first treat the image and work on it by hand. Then we scan it and take it through Photoshop,” he said.
“Apon moner Madhuri,” he quotes Tagore. “The best work is not possible without your own creativity,” he said. Without it there can be an image, but no soul.
