Why Kishor Parekh’s photojournalism is especially relevant in the era of controlled, curated images

On January 30, 1963, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sat on the ground at Delhi’s Birla House before dawn, paying homage to Mohandas Gandhi on his death anniversary at the site at which he had been murdered.

Even as he bowed his head, Nehru’s face bore the anxiety of the corrosive war with China a few months before.

Standing unobtrusively in the shadows, Kishor Parekh, the chief photographer at the Hindustan Times, squeezed the trigger of his camera to capture Nehru in a moment of vulnerability. The flash startled the prime minister and he reprimanded Parekh.

Despite Nehru’s displeasure, Parekh published the photograph the following morning on the front page of the Hindustan Times. Nehru’s irritation did not last long. His office later requested ten copies of the image, perhaps recognising its emotional and aesthetic appeal.

This incident was celebrated by the Indian press photographers’ corps as a moment of journalistic courage. It also marked a challenge to the predefined norms of press photography, as Parekh broke away from the cautious, staged visuality that typically surrounded political figures.

As a tribute to Parekh’s role as catalyst in helping Indian photojournalism to make a shift from state-led events to people-centric storytelling, the Kishor Parekh Photography Trust in December announced the Kishor Parekh Award for Contemporary Photography that will come with a prize of Rs 7 lakh.

“News photography in India can be divided into two eras: pre-Kishor Parekh and post.” the trust said as it announced the award. “Never before had a photographer so altered the visual landscape of newsprint in India.”

Kishor Harilal Parekh (1930-1982) served as chief photographer at the Hindustan Times in Delhi from 1961 to 1967. In his short tenure, he had a radical impact on press photography in India. “Pahalwan” or wrestler, as he was known to his colleagues, introduced two major changes to photojournalism, switching the picture format from 120 mm to 35 mm; and infusing action into what had previously been mundane political coverage.

Parekh had graduated in cinema and documentary still photography from the University of Southern California in 1961. Influenced by photographers like Eugene Smith, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Margaret Bourke-White, Parekh adopted a humanist approach and focused on the daily lives of ordinary citizens alongside state-led activities in the 1960s.

To be sure, he was not the first Indian to do so. Photographers such as Sunil Janah had already been exposed to this visual approach through the work of figures like Cartier-Bresson and Bourke-White, both of whom photographed extensively in India before Independence. But this approach was neither widely practiced by Indian photographers nor given space in the press, at least during the first decade of Independence.

The candid approach Parekh brought to photographing politicians did not last long. He was eventually barred by the officials of the President’s House from covering events in the Rashtrapati Bhavan: photographer Shail Nath Sinha, who worked with the Hindustan Times from 1971 to 2006, said that a placard was placed at the reception of Rashtrapati Bhavan stating: “Kishor Parekh, photographer of Hindustan Times, is strictly prohibited from entering and photographing in the President’s House.”

Alongside state-led events in Delhi, Parekh documented the daily lives of ordinary and marginalised people who were often invisible in the national narrative of development and progress. He photographed coal miners, slum dwellers, famine victims and the Naxalbari movement.

His coverage of the Bihar famine in 1966 became a turning point in integrating humanist photography into political commentary. This work earned him the inaugural National Press Photography Award in the newly created Human Interest category introduced by the Press Institute of India in 1966.

Between 1967 and 1972, Parekh worked with Asia magazine and served as picture editor at Pacific Magazine Limited, based in Singapore and Hong Kong. His first photobook, Bangladesh: A Brutal Birth, published in English and French language, remains the pinnacle of his photographic career. It contained agonising images of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, which culminated in the creation of Bangladesh. The Indian government commissioned the first 20,000 copies of the book. It is a powerful testament to the Bangladesh liberation movement.

In today’s era of visual politics, where images are carefully curated controlled, and circulated, Parekh’s work reminds us of the courage and craft that defined Indian photojournalism in the 1960s.

Many photographers easily slip into seeking institutional validation for their work particularly from the state, when in fact, the process should be reversed. As an employee of the Hindustan Times, working within the organisation’s editorial guidelines, Parekh’s work reveals the negotiations and degree of autonomy a photojournalist can exercise in order to balance creativity and socio-political commentary.

The impact he had on the profession was summed up by a statement by celebrated photographer Raghu Rai, as he looked back on his early career at The Statesman in the mid-1960s, assisting Kishor Parekh. Said Rai, “I would not be a photojournalist if Parekh had not been there.”

Javed Sultan is a PhD candidate at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, UK. His research examines the relationship between photography and democracy, focusing on how photojournalism shaped democratic imagination, public discourse and cultural identity during the formative years of India’s independence.