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Dec 20, 1999
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SPECIAL SERIES Swapan
Parekh, 33
Photographer
STREET SMART
Tough talk. "I want to really kick my ass and do
something," says Swapan Parekh. "You know, use urban people as an idiom."
Thing is, Parekh just wants to shift gears. The son of photo-journalism icon Kishore has
taken his social documentarist technique -- human interest photography, if you will -- to
commercial photography. He has a World Press Award for spot-news photography but for him
it's like saying news is what I can do but art is what I like to do. His recent work for
The Times of India cleaned up the awards; anybody who has seen the Mitsubishi Lancer
campaign will understand why.
"Kick my ass" means he wants to take his
directorial bent out of the office. Parekh "hates" manipulating photos or
computer-generated images. Real-time for him is with body language, on the streets --
"my real institute," he says, though the other one, the International Centre of
Photography in New York, is a useful handle to have. It's taught him that talent combined
with structured humility is a good formula to go places.
-Hemant
Pithwa |
