Photographer of the Kingfisher Calendar, Atul Kasbekar is one of India’s best-known photographers.

Fotoflock managed to track him down to talk about, amongst other things, the Kingfisher calendar for 2009 and how his attitude to photography has changed over the years.

You trained for over a year in Los Angeles, working with photographers such as Dennis Gray, Ron Slenzak, James B Wood, Jay Silverman, Jay P Morgan, Bill Werts and David Le Bon. What did you gain from this experience?
I think I learned as much from this experience as I did from three years at the Brooks Institute (Santa Barbara, USA). Having said that, the two are interlinked: if I hadn’t had the background that I did, I probably wouldn’t have gotten as much out of the experience.

You have photographed many celebrities from the worlds of fashion, cinema, business and sports. Which type of celebrities do you find easiest to work with?
I don’t think of a celebrity as a celebrity – for me they are just human beings with the same issues and insecurities as the rest of us, if not more!

So I wouldn’t say that I find a particular type of celebrity easier to work. I’m a people person – I make friends with them within five minutes of meeting them! I am whatever they want me to be – a listener, a talker, a joker or their best friend.

I do have one blanket rule for working with celebrities – I won’t talk to them about their line of work. For example, if they are a cricketer, I won’t talk to them about cricket (unless they bring it up first). I just treat them like regular human beings – celebrities like that! In fact, a lot of them end up becoming friends.

Apart from your corporate portraits, all of your portraits are in black and white. Why is this?
Sometimes I find colour is too distracting as colour tells you where to look. In black and white, the soul is a lot more exposed. After all, I find that life ends up being shades of grey!

Your campaign for Gizmo is very interesting in that the models look almost like waxwork statues…
Yes although I can’t take credit for this as it was first done by a Frenchman called Thierry Le Goues and the idea was suggested to me by Gizmo. At first I loathed the idea of doing something that had been done before but I came round to the idea.

In this country, I find that often people will shamelessly lift another’s work. Copying is the easiest way out. We have to learn that it’s one thing to be inspired and another thing to copy. We’re not Xerox machines – our work should be influenced by our lives’ experiences.

Why did you decide to do the Kingfisher calendar?
Let me see … it involved playing around with lots of money and travelling to exotic locations with the most happening chicks! (Laughs)

Whose idea was it?
The idea to do a swimsuit calendar was mine. I made a dummy and approached Mr. Vijay Mallya with it. Half-way through my presentation he said to me, “This is a great idea; let’s do it. How much money do you need?” I gave him a figure off the top of my head and it turned out to be the wrong one as, in the first year, we made a loss of five lakhs! However, we managed to turn it around and today the calendar is a cult phenomenon.

How has it helped you and Kingfisher?
Vijay Mallya has gone on record to say that it’s the most effective piece of advertising for the Kingfisher Group there has ever been. The return on investment for Kingfisher has also been phenomenal. As for me, it has been great for my career. People from all over the world have given me a lot of positive feedback about all the calendars. This year, in particular, the response has been phenomenal.

What was your approach to the calendar this year?
I treated the calendar for 2009 as a predictive space. The eighties were very hedonistic and overly sexy (think of Calvin Klein, “Obsession” for example). Then the nineties became very minimal, family-oriented and gentle (as exemplified by Calvin Klein “Eternity”). Then, at the turn of the century, the whole world went mad and became very over the top once again.

Therefore I predicted that the trend is going to become a lot softer, simpler and less brash and this is the approach I adopted towards the 2009 calendar. I didn’t want to wait for this to happen and then react to it – I predicted that “this is the way it’s going to be”. For me, it was all about rediscovering the joy of photography, without any gimmickery.

I wanted to go back to basics, to rediscover why it was that I wanted to do this a profession in the first place: the love of light, of photography, and of people.

Today, a lot of photographers’ aesthetic knowledge is very mediocre. They gloss over the whole thing so that the package is alright but the core of the image is flawed. I would advise these photographers to learn the rules before you break them – don’t just mask the inadequacies. If you look at great images from the past (such as Richard Avedon’s images through the years, a case in point being the legendary Versace campaign he did with Marcus and Stephanie Seymour) you’ll discover that they’re timeless. You don’t need to play around with images like this – they’re perfect.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being one of India’s best-known photographers?
The main advantage is that I make a living out of something that I would be doing anyway. When I started out, I used to be horrendously competitive and I would be harrowed if I lost out on an assignment. Now I couldn’t give two hoots; I’ve become quite chilled out. I think this is because I’ve realised that no matter how hard you try, you can’t make a photo that the whole world loves. I just do my own thing and if X number of people around the world value my work then I’m happy.

What do you write about in your blog?
Nothing to do with photography! I write about a variety of subjects but I haven’t yet managed to do it consistently.

I think this helps my photography because I find that a lot of it – a place you went to, a book you read – sinks into what you do. It influences your work subliminally. Photography is a cocktail of your life’s experiences. So I would advise photographers to read a lot of books on all subjects; not just photography. As a photographer you must have a rounded view of the planet. Travel is a part of that; luckily while shooting the Kingfisher calendar I have had the opportunity to travel to many parts of the world. I would advise others to do the same.

Photos by Atul Kasbekar | Fotosocial