Agroup photograph of a class taken in 1962 is pure nostalgia, compared with current digital technology used by smartphone-toting youngsters who take a selfie or a video at the slightest provocation, and share results instantly at no cost. Any talk of a school-leaving final year group photo brings nostalgia, to anyone. I recall my own experience in the month of March in 1962. We, the students of the final year of our class at A.S. Higher Secondary School, Khanna (Punjab), a boys’ school, were told to come dressed up for the group photograph on the chosen day.
Ours was a large school with six sections in the final class, and each section having about 60 boys. The group photographs were taken section-wise from A to F. The boys assembled,in the open,at the schoolgroundat 4.30pm, considering that ideal conditions of natural lighting would be just about an hour before sunset which happened at about 6.45 pm. The boys were all in white shirts, and trousers with some of them wearing neck-ties, though our school had no formal dress-code for students.
Some teachers, including those who taught the Section being photographed, and a P.T. teacher, were on duty to keep the boys organizedas per the instructions of the photographer. At about 5 p.m., a photographer from Sharma Studios, the best in town, arrived with a collapsible largeformat camera, a tripod, and other accessories.
He was accompanied by the Headmaster of our school. We were all guided to a location in the shade, where the light was diffuse and a few boys quickly helped to set up the chairs for the first row on which the teachers would sit. Leaving space for the second row for the boys who would stand, the classroom benches were aligned for the third and fourth rows, in both of which the boys would stand. The photographer had, in the meantime, set up his camera on the large tripod, and was checking the scene through the camera’s rear part, looking at the image falling on a ground glass sheet through a large lens in the front in order that he could set the best conditions of exposure and depth-of-field before transferring the image to film,which would be developed later in his studio.At about 5.30 pm, Section A boys were asked by the P.T. teacher to take up their positions in the assigned rows.Minor shifting of the boys was done as per the suggestions of the photographer’s assistant.
The boys from the other Sections, including our B Section, were asked to wait in queue at a distance. Finally, when all things were set to the satisfaction of the photographer, the teachers of Section A were asked to sit on chairs in the front row, with Mr. Madan Gopal Chopra, the Headmaster, in the middle. The camera was facing them at a distance of about fifteen feet. The photographer and his assistant, while standing near the camera covered by the black cloth to avoid any extraneous light falling on it, shouted a few routine instructions, such as asking the boys to look at the camera straight, and stay rocksteady during the exposure of the film-plate, until they are told, DONE! No talking was permitted during the period of exposure of the film, to avoid distractions and movement of any boy.
At this juncture, the photographer took out a film holder – a rectangular wooden box, containing the film, and fitted it to the rear of the camera for exposure. He shouted READY, raising his finger, and pulled out the opaque sheet in front of the film. All went quiet. The few-seconds exposure done by removing the cover from the front lens looked like an eternity, and ended with a loud ‘DONE’! Next came the turn of my Section B. I was wearing a white shirt borrowed from RavinderSood, my friend who did his M.D. later and became a well-known doctor of the town. (He passed away recently, and this piece is dedicated to him.) We, Section B, too, went through the same cycle of instructions to get our group photograph done.
Each student was asked to collect his copy of the group photograph from the photographer’s Studio, after a week. When I look at that B&W photograph now, all the boys of my section look glum and tight. I am standing in the third row from the top. It is fun to locate the exact position of a classmate in this photograph after six decades have passed, since the boys became men, settled in their professions and facial features of many changed enormously with age. Interestingly, the pose of the teachers sitting in the first row in a school group photograph hasn’t changed much over the years, with each of them sitting with both hands folded in the lap for symmetry.
A study in posture was our Headmaster, who invariably sat stiff like a statue, whether in our 1962 group photographs, or the group photographs of students takenat our school, before or after. He is found sitting in the same pose, head tilted a bit to his left, headgear in place, as always. He can’t be blamed because anyone ‘in position’ who sat for a B&W group photograph in those days had to look important. T
ake the case of the famous group photograph taken at the Solvay conference in Belgium in 1927, in which 17 of the group of the famous 29 posing for the photograph were already or would became Nobel Prize winners. It shows each one of them looking fairly serious, perhaps as per the directions of the photographer, and no one is smiling. Compare this with the scenario at large conferences these days, at times with a few hundred participants. The photographer needs to perch on the roof of a portico at the venue of the conference, or peer through his camera from a first-floor window to cover all the participants, some of whom still continuein animated conversation with other participants standing alongside, even while being clicked.
But with the digital color technology supporting him, the photographer does get the best results, that too without shouting any instructions to stay still, etc. These days, when my grandchildren bring their school group photographs, I can notice that the children, as well as their teachers in them often look relaxed and even smiling, and that now the photographs are in colour, clicked by a photographer using a small digital focusing camera. And several children and parents even click the group with their smartphone, with adequately good results.
(The writer is ex-Chairman, Atomic Energy Research Society, Mumbai and former Associate Director, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre.)