SHILLONG, Dec 12: In an age when artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of image-making, iconic photographer Pablo Bartholomew came to Shillong with a quiet reminder: the deepest photographs are still born from lived memory, stubborn solitude, and time spent with people the world prefers to forget.
Speaking to The Shillong Times on the sidelines of the Winter Tales Festival on Friday, the 69-year-old master photographer looked back on half a century behind the lens — and forward to a possible homecoming in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills.
It began, he says, at home. His father, the critic and photographer Richard Bartholomew, turned their Delhi flat into an improvised darkroom.
“Watching film appear in the tray felt like magic,” Pablo recalls. When school finally expelled him, he wasn’t upset. He already knew what he wanted to do.
Photography suited his temperament: mechanics, optics, chemistry, travel — all in one compact kit. Filmmaking tempted him, but “I’m not good with groups,” he laughs. “I’m a one-man band.”
His first thunderclap arrived early. At 19, his harrowing series on Delhi’s morphine addicts won the 1975-76 World Press Photo — the first time a South Asian had claimed the prize. Access, he insists, came from the inside. “I was a bit mad in those days. I experimented with everything.” A European juror spotted the work at a local contest and pushed him to sign up. He did.
Nine years later, a single frame from the Bhopal gas tragedy — a child’s hand emerging from rubble — brought him the World Press Photo of the Year award. The award felt glorious at 29. Then he kept returning to Bhopal. “I watched survivors get sicker, compensation turn into a farce, and justice evaporate,” he says. The photograph became “a crown of thorns.”
Recognition, he notes dryly, does not pay rent. Most of his long-term projects on marginal tribes, diaspora lives and fractured identities remain self-funded. “I’m the child of two refugees,” he shrugs. “Being decorated by the republic feels ironic, but it only takes you so far.”
That sense has always driven him eastward. His father’s stories of the 1942 “Trek Out of Burma” — 30 days on foot, saved again and again by Naga villages — lodged deep. “How could the same people labelled headhunters show such kindness?” The paradox pulled him into Nagaland’s remotest corners for years.
“When you’re young, you have a certain madness,” he said with a smile. Now the madness has mellowed into something gentler. “I want to come back to the Khasi and Jaintia Hills,” he says, “to revisit, to close circles.” Work on Satyajit Ray’s sets and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi taught him light and framing, but confirmed his preference for solitude. “Ray was a one-man band too,” he says fondly.
On AI and the smartphone deluge, he is blunt. “Everyone can write sentences now; very few can write poetry. Same with pictures.” He uses Photoshop as a digital darkroom — “nothing more.” Beyond that, he sees danger. “AI removes struggle. Struggle is where meaning lives.” His advice to young photographers is stark: “A real career in photography barely exists anymore. Keep a day job so your love doesn’t turn into a chore. Wedding gigs pay, but after a thousand identical poses your eye dies.”
After fifty years, his ambition has simplified. “I want books,” he says. “Prints fade; books endure.” He and his father left behind mountains of unpublished work. He intends to shape them into lasting volumes.
On his plans for Shillong, he says nothing is fixed yet. “I don’t even have a title,” he laughs when asked about a possible series name. But the city already lives inside him — another thread in a life stitched together by exile, memory, and the stubborn belief that a single honest frame can still matter. He, however, acknowledged Shillong’s place in his family history. “My mother came to Lady Keane College… I’m not sure whether she studied there; it’s family history I still need to verify.”
Whether new photographs will emerge from this visit remains unwritten. For Pablo Bartholomew, simply standing again in these hills feels like continuation enough.
