William Dalrymple: 'When my friends were chasing girls, I was playing with film in darkrooms'

We know him for The City of Djinns and for The Jaipur Literature Festival. We know him as a historian, a writer and a walker of goats. But not many know that William Dalrymple has always been a photographer. Yes, a photographer who used film and played with chemicals in darkrooms during an age when photography required more than a phone with a camera.

But that was some 30-odd years ago.

Today, thanks to some prodding by author Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Dalrymple has found himself promoting a three-city exhibition of 45 of his black and white photographs titled The Writer's Eye. Curated by Shanghvi, The Writer's Eye has already shown in Goa and will shortly be displayed at Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery before travelling onwards to London. The exhibition is rather unusual – all photographs have been taken with a phone camera.

Starting young

Dalrymple’s love affair with photography started when he was just seven and was gifted his first camera – a small Kodak. Eight years later, his great aunt died and left him with a decent sum of money. “Too much money for a 15-year-old,” quipped the author. He used that bequest to buy himself his first fancy camera, a manual SLR. "It was the most precious thing I owned," said Dalrymple. "I took care of it with such love, I kept it in velvet."

His interest in photography continued till well into his late teens. "My friends were in the pub or chasing girls while I would be in the dark room swilling around chemicals and coming out with these photographs," he said, laughing throatily.

However, photography took a back seat when he signed a contract to write his first book while still at university. The photographs he took during his research for In Xanadu constituted his first photography exhibition as a student. It was held at the University of Cambridge. That was in 1986.

Several decades and best-selling books later, Dalrymple, now 51, started photographing seriously again.

This time, he’s abandoned the tools that most professional photographers (and so many amateurs) spend a fortune on – he’s not kitted out with the latest equipment.

He uses his Samsung camera phone to shoot, and edits the images using an app called Snapseed. "I found that I was being able to take the kind of pictures I liked, using just my phone,” said Dalrymple. “The camera was able to reproduce the sort of dark, grainy visuals and extreme contrasts I have always been partial to and now I was being able to do it within 30 seconds."

Dalrymple loves that the phone camera allows him to be discreet. "I have taken amazing portraits while pretending to check my mail," he admitted. He also seems to be having fun with its limitations. The flare created by his Samsung phone’s lens would ordinarily be considered a flaw, but it enhances a photograph by Dalrymple of an arch at the Taj Mahal in Agra bathed in a strange light.

He admitted that there are drawbacks in using a phone camera in terms of the amount of control he had over the final product. You can't change lenses or play with the shutter speed or the aperture, he said. But the ease of using a phone camera compensated these shortcomings. “As a travel writer, I find that frequently the best stories tend to unfold when you put your notebook away,” said Dalrymple. “The same applies to photography. The best photographs are made when you least expect it and don't have your camera with you. But now you do."

Focus on art

The exhibition and the book don’t include any contextual details like date, time or captions. This is the result of a decision by curator Shanghvi who felt putting captions would make the project a book or exhibition of pictures about Dalrymple's travels rather than a series of art works.

All photographs in The Writer's Eye were taken over the last two years during Dalrymple’s various assignments in Iran, Afghanistan, and his travels within India. The oldest image is one from Ladakh in September 2014.

But why return to photography after all these years?

The author laughed and said he held Shanghvi responsible. “I used to put these photographs up on Facebook and Instagram like anybody else,” he said. “But something in these caught Siddharth’s eyes and he offered to put them together into a body of work. I just held him to it.”

He added: “You have to usually work hard to achieve something. But this is a rare example of an opportunity being thrust upon you.”

And will we ever get to see Dalrymple's early works? The photographs he made as a student?

"I have them tucked away at home in Scotland,” said the author. “When I go home I will be digging those out. Let's see how this exhibition goes and if I'm called out as a complete fraud."

That’s for his viewers to decide, of course. They can start now. Here are some photographs from The Writer's Eye.