The Telegraph, Metro on Sunday, 13 April 2008

A photograph by Eifert János

Hungarian photographer Eifert János is busy shooting what he intends to title the Calcutta Portraits. Calcutta, he says, is a city of dynamic faces and beautiful people.

“There is a wall close to where I live and one series I am working on is photographs of all that happens on and across it. The wall for me is a metaphor of life,” says Janos, whose work was on display at the Academy of Fine Arts from April 8-13.

As a host of city-based photographer Mala Mukherjee, Janos will be scouring the town with his camera till April 23. The Calcutta photographs, says Janos, will be mostly like a report unless he wants to experiment with them more later on. A number of photographs displayed at the Academy were of the “reporting” kind, recording the pristine beauty of the beaches and architecture of Arabia. Also on display was one of his first photographs, of the legendary mime artiste Marcel Marceau.

To Janos they are not as important as his montages. “Even in the first Marceau photograph I had taken with the classical film, I did a montage with another image. But in the last five or six years I find myself turning more and more to the digital medium to give the photographs the meaning and power I want.”

Janos, who started off as a folk dancer, visited India as part of a group in 1974. “I performed in Varanasi and Calcutta but I was not a photographer then,” he laughs.

(Contributed by Sebanti Sarkar)