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Moments with Gunter Grass

FAYZA HAQ
Gunter Grass, a Nobel Prize laureate, is Germany's greatest living writer. To celebrate his 79th birthday Goethe Institut has organised a solo exhibition by the prominent portrait photographer Nasir Ali Mamun. The exhibit is for a fortnight, beginning from 11th October. Mamun was close to Grass when he visited Dhaka in 1986 and also when he went to Kolkata in January 2005.
Mamun, as a child, collected photographs of famous people from newspapers in the early sixties. He used to contemplate not only on the subjects but also the camera that took the photo. After 1971 he felt that he should go into a big way into photography: capturing famous people
through the lens became his obsession. He felt that his seniors went in for photographing birds, flowers and picturesque scenes. Mamun wanted to be different and his source of inspiration remained famous people all along. He had no camera and no training in photography. He faced a problem in making the famous immortal through the lens: there were no statistics of the poets, singers, scientists. He went to the Bangla Academy and got a list of a sort from there; the Atomic Energy Commission provided him some more names. He worked with borrowed cameras from friends. Often these cameras were old , covered with fungus and dated back to the thirties like Zeissikon and Vioglander makes.
“At that time in Dhaka there were
only about a 100 camera in circulation among amateurs. My father was not rich and there were nine children in our family. It was in 1977 that I had a camera of my own and it cost Tk 600. Today I'm the photo editor of Prothom Alo. I concentrate on portraits in black and white. I feel that emotions and pain can best be captured in black and white, which is more dramatic. With our country's humidity colour photos last longer. I work on famous people who have many frustrations of their own which can best be reflected in black and white. I sympathise with them as I too have my limitations,” Mamun explained.
Why did he focus on Gunther Grass? Mamun was fascinated by him as he was a controversial figure and was world famous . His works like
“Tin Drum” intrigued all readers . He suffered during the World War II and was widely travelled. “ He did not like the idea of interviews or photographs. But when he came to Dhaka in 1986 I got a chance to be with him for a week. Along with poet Belal Chowdhury and his wife Ute, we went around Dhaka. I didn't find him short tempered, but rather affectionate and sympathetic, particularly to poor slum children and vagabonds that gathered around him as we went sight seeing. When we went to Panam, Sonargaon, he and his wife ate dust-covered fruit from the
trees as the street children had offered them. 'They are tokens of love' he'd explained to Ute.” He admired Zainul Abedin's paintings and enjoyed the local spicy food in a floating restaurant on the Buriganga, recalled Mamun. When he returned to Kolkata 18 years later, there was heavy security, as he was now a Nobel laureate. But when Mamun finally got in touch with him Grass was as warm as ever.
The exhibition includes photographs that cover moments in Gunther Grass's visit to Dhaka and Kolkata.