Bastar The Lost Heritage

His aesthetic photographic sense was expressed in his Industrial, Commercial work and Advertising assignments. This Enabled Ahmed Ali to imprint his artistic stamp in photography spanning over 70 years of work.

Ahmed Ali’s involvement with photography goes back to the year 1932 when at the age of eleven he was sent away from Calcutta to boarding school in Ranchi and was handed a farewell present of a box camera by one of his aunts. This became his pride and joy, and over the next year he put it to full use, turning out a whole range of pictures with subjects like scenery and clouds, sports events, buildings, not to mention portraits of his family and friends. At school he found he could sometimes sell his pictures to his friends and even to the school itself, and he used to plough back his earnings into buying films, thus squeezing far more and better photographs out of the camera than its manufacturers could have dreamt it would produce.

His mother Nellie Saxby encouraged his enthusiasm by sponsoring a superior camera and at the age of thirteen he ended up by converting this into an enlarger. From then on it was clear that photography would be his lifetime career. The hobby did not prevent him from being a good student and also excelling on the sports field as a football player and athlete. The Principal encouraged him by giving him the use of a small room to convert into a dark room on condition that it must only be used during his free time from studies and also not after lights-out.

By the time he was in college at St. Xavier’s Ahmed Ali had become a popular amateur photographer and one of the founders of The Photographic Society of Calcutta. He decided against studying either Engineering or Arts because that would have meant being financially dependent on his father for seven years, whereas as a photographer he could start earning straightaway. It was now the time when the Second World War had just ended and India had become free and was beginning to build up her own industries. As a result, catalogues and advertisements were needed to sell the products being produced and this created a demand for photographs. Ahmed Ali with his enthusiasm, dedication and experience was the choice of the day. Bengal had become a centre of industry and he found himself being summoned with his camera time and again to such places as coal mines, mica mines, aluminium plants, jute mills and tea gardens.