NGMA Mumbai :“I have been a photographer longer than I have been a doctor”

About Dr. Debal Sen:

​Dr. Debal Sen's ​photography defies the urbane world of Kolkata where he resides and is a practicing cardiologist. It is difficult to imagine this cardiologist of such great repute be able to divide his time equally between the two critical aspects of his life: life-saving through health giving, for which he yields his medical skills; and life-saving through Nature-worship for which he wields his camera.

​In spite of his considerable fame as a cardiologist, Dr Sen avers: ​

“I have been a photographer longer than I have been a doctor”

His journeys across the country's wilds from coast to coast and mountains to plains stand testament in to his prolific creations: photographs that look like paintings. 

Partnered with the Museum's current exhibition: "Nature Embedded - a Design Technology Experience,"  Dr Sen's photography as one of fifteen different medias at the Museum, also finds itself intervening with Augmented Reality (AR) to reveal an additional layer of visual imagery.  

In the words of the author of these photographs, Dr Debal Sen:

“The images presented here were garnered over a period of three decades. They took me from the high altitude lakes of Ladakh, to the glacial rivers of the high Himalayas, onto the lakes, rivers and wetlands of the baking plains of central India, across the puddles and pools of the great mangrove swamps of Orissa, West Bengal and the Andaman Islands, to culminate in the varied coastlines of the subcontinent”

And then summing up his experience of water as the subject through the idiom of shoreline, the author concludes:

“These shores extend from the edge of a dewdrop to the edge of the sea – between music and silence, between color and white”.

The words are reminiscent of the photography of Ansel Adams who viewed life through the lens of Nature, choosing to see it unfiltered as the great wilds of the outdoors, with a protestant spirit that only Nature could wield.

No wonder then, to experience these images, in the words of the poet Corbin, is to “browse in the archives of the Earth.”