The World in his Sights

From the North Pole to Africa, Sumantra Banerjee, camera hanging from his shoulders, goes in search of the remote and rugged.

Care to indulge in some armchair travelling? For three days starting 26 November, Kolkata will host Dream on Canvas, an exhibition of 250 photographs by Sumantra Banerjee. Banerjee, a man of wide-ranging tastes and passions, peels off the daily disguise he wears as managing director of power utility Calcutta Electricity Supply Corporation Ltd to showcase images that he captured during his travels in the North Pole, Baltic Sea, Alaska, Africa and Europe. “I love to travel and click photographs, which I developed into a serious hobby in 1995. The idea of transferring the photos to canvas occurred to me a few years ago,” Banerjee says. And he decided to tie it up with a charitable cause: the proceeds from the sale of the very affordable canvases, priced between Rs 5,000 and Rs 12,000, will go to Future Hope, a charity for Kolkata’s street children.

While the exhibition displays his prowess in landscape, wildlife, nature and architectural photography, Banerjee himself clarifies that he prefers capturing landscapes using his Nikon D-700 and D-300. And the more rugged and remote the area, the better. “I love Ladakh, for instance, or the Spitsburgen archipelago in the North Pole,” he says. 

But he admits he’s not always a good co-traveller. “I go with my friends and family. I’m great company till we venture outdoors, when I get totally into the photography. I become unsocial. For instance, when I was at Juneau in Alaska, I spent more than 45 minutes shooting a bald eagle. My fellow travellers got disgusted and walked away,” he says. Visitors to the exhibition, though, are unlikely to harbour such feelings.

Dream on Canvas will run at Emami Towers on Eastern Metropolitan Bypass, Kolkata over 26-29 November

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