Between Motion and Emotion

When photographer Tejinder Singh Khamkha is on a film set, he takes an average of 700 photographs a day. As a still photographer, his days are long, and a film is shot over months. A typical day involves moving around the set with his camera, keenly observing everyone at work. He keeps an eye on proceedings as actors get into costume and rehearse, the director briefs his crew, until it all culminates in the big scene of the day. Singh captures the mood and energy of this creative process, silently creating his own movie on the side.

At 33, Singh has been on over 20 sets, including films and shows. When we speak, he is stationed in Thailand, capturing filmmaker Aditya Dhar’s next (post Article 370 and Uri: The Surgical Strike), starring Ranveer Singh, Sanjay Dutt and Akshaye Khanna. The depth of his involvement varies from film to film. Sometimes he is called in for a few weeks, espe­cially around important scenes. But there are also filmmakers like Meghna Gulzar who would make actors redo a scene, just so that Singh can capture them in the act. Hansal Mehta, with whom Singh has worked on three projects, wants him around all the time. For his unreleased show Gandhi, based on Ramachandra Guha’s books, Singh was even present for actor Pratik Gandhi’s look tests as Mahatma Gandhi.

Given a choice, this is how he would like to work on every film. “There is a lot that I do besides taking photos. The first few days are about getting to know the actors, how they interact with the space, how they interact with the crew… Sometimes I hold actors just after they are done with the scene for portrait shots, sometimes I’ll photograph them while they’re doing the scene. So I need to establish a comfort level. If I only go once a week, I will be alien to everybody on set.”

Photographing actors when they are vulnerable is not easy. A glance through any actor’s Instagram page will tell you how carefully curated their public image is. “I’ve been told by an actor to my face, ‘I’m not going to hold or give you any time to take photos, because they do nothing. They will rot in hard drives. So, what’s the point?’” Singh went back to the actor the next day with a shortlist of photos he had taken. His work spoke for itself. “This way they know I’m not bullshitting.”

Over time, he’s cracked a few ice-breaking techniques. “I carry my coffee beans, grinder and triple filter paper to set. Kareena (Kapoor Khan) saw me grinding my own coffee beans on [the recently released] The Buckingham Murders and that’s how we started chatting,” says Singh. The other thing that always piques curiosity is his fast-growing Instagram handle— @khamkhaphotoartist (with nearly 50,000 followers).

“Everyone is intrigued by the name. Kareena just calls me Khamkha now,” he says.

Singh’s Instagram handle started blowing up after his first film Manmarziyaan (2018) when director Anurag Kashyap shared his behind-the-scenes photos and tagged him on every image—a courtesy not every photographer gets. In the run-up to the release, actor Abhishek Bachchan posted Singh’s candid images, which captured the drama between shots on his social media. For a month, he would post his unseen images daily with an anecdote. He, too, credited Singh, which in turn led to him getting more assignments.

Singh cannot quite label his style of photography, perhaps because he is not formally trained. Raised in Bathinda, Punjab, he was studying to be an architect till he dropped out in the fourth year. “I guess it’s an amalgamation of fashion, documentary and lifestyle. My inspirations are Raghu Rai and Prabuddha Dasgupta. I learnt from their work,” he says.

Whatever you may call his style, it is working. Earlier this year, Punjabi superstar Diljit Dosanjh’s team reached out to Singh after they saw his images of Vicky Kaushal praying at the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Sometime later, Singh was walking through the congested flower market in Mumbai’s Dadar area and felt this was where he would like to shoot the star. He shot a few images of himself at the market and sent them to Dosanjh’s team as a reference. The next morning, the pop star was at the market. “When he arrived, I gave him a jhola with sunflowers. My brief to him was to go to every shop and buy flowers. If you feel like staying there for a while or leaning into a wall, just go for it. He walked down the lane buying flowers and in 20 minutes, we were out,” remembers Singh.

The gradual attention Singh’s work is getting is heartening to watch. Still, photographers on a set hardly find mention. A lot of their work, unlike Singh’s, is stagey, and never sees the light of day. In the last few decades, the only other still photographer in Hindi cinema who has received recognition is Ishika Mohan Motwane, who apart from working on all her husband Vikramaditya Motwane’s films, also photo­graphed Slumdog Millionaire, Veer-Zara, and others. “I reached out to Ishika because Gandhi was my first period show and a lot of it is shot against blue screens. I wanted to know how one works on projects that are heavy on VFX and I knew that she had recently been through that while working on Jubilee… We’re trying to build a community of film photographers. There’s a WhatsApp group where we reach out to each other,” he says.

The photos that Singh takes on set also end up becoming the film’s poster. For example, the Chhapaak (2020) poster in which Deepika Padukone is smiling against the Delhi skyline, showing her scarred face, was taken while shooting a scene that did not make it to the film. This is a fairly new phenomenon. Tradition­ally, Hindi film posters are created in a studio much after the film is done. Actors get back into costume and pose against a false backdrop with props and exaggerated expressions to try and recreate the tone of the film. But it is never the same. The poster of Kareena Kapoor Khan’s The Buckingham Murders, in which she plays a grieving mother, has her screaming in anger as cops pull her away. It is a moment that cannot be recreated in a studio.

“Only recently, studios have realised it makes sense to have a photographer on set who can capture actors in their element. Moreover, it’s more cost-efficient, or else you have to book a studio later and do a shoot. I think Netflix has changed a lot about how we work. They use these photos also as a part of their marketing plan to promote the film. Now, others can see how it helps create buzz and intrigue around a release,” says Singh.

But there is a larger purpose to Singh’s work. Unit-still photographers get to capture and record the magic of cinema as it unfolds in real time. It is a potent tool to document the work of artists and how they come together to create a work of art. The Hindi film industry is notoriously callous about archiving and preserving film history. Singh has been in situations where the production house has misplaced his hard drives. He, of course, recognises the long-term value of what he is creating but does not bother selling that logic to producers. “I feel that if someone does not understand the value of this work, I can never make them understand. So, then I just focus on telling them how they will save money by having a photographer on set,” he says, adding, “Unfortunately, that’s the only way.”

Diljit DosanjhKareena Kapoormaking of moviesphotographyTejinder Singh KhamkhaThe Buckingham Murders