Remembering Navroze Contractor with Photography Strictly Prohibited

Photography Strictly Prohibited celebrates the life and work of Navroze Contractor in Bengaluru this weekend

Navroze Contractor was a world renown photographer and cinematographer from Ahmedabad who had made Bengaluru his home. A series of events titled Photography Strictly Prohibited, encapsulating the genius of his artistic abilities, marks the first year anniversary of his death as well as his birthday. He would have turned 80 on July 7, this year.

Curated by Sanjiv Shah, Anuj Ambalal and Himanshu Panchal, the exhibition will showcase photographs Navroze took over a period of 60 years, many of which have not been seen previously.

“We had travelled a lot together taking pictures while working on various projects. A couple of years ago, I talked to him about a retrospective of his work and he laughed it off saying retrospectives were “an end of career” activity. I countered that saying we’d title it a mid-career retrospective,” recalls Anuj Ambalal.

However, Navroze was “quite keen on doing a book on his work,” Anuj says, adding that on hearing of his demise, “One of the first things that came to my mind was to do this retrospective.”

“Sanjiv was a dear friend of Navroze’s and they enjoyed a long association on both personal and professional levels. So he knew a lot about the photographs that we began browsing through for this show.”

Between the three of them, they viewed more than 20,000 photos over a period of about six to nine months, to organise the exhibition and the publication. The result is Photography Strictly Prohibited.

“If we were to summarise this curation, I would say there came a point when we realised that subconsciously, intuitively, the three of us were structuring it in such a way that it was more about Navroze than his work.”