Slumdog Photographer

His own story is astonishing, but Vicky Roy’s photos of Ground Zero would stand out even without his life graph.

Danny Boyle would love Vicky Roy. The boy who ran away from his grandparents in a village in Purulia, West Bengal, because school was boring. Spent six months ragpicking at a railway station in New Delhi before he was taken in by the Salaam Balak Trust. Who took photos of his friends with a plastic Kodak camera for Rs 10 apiece, and wanted to go abroad. That boy is now showing his second exhibition of photographs, WTC: Now. Slumdog photographer.

It is that kind of story. At his opening in Delhi, there was little place to stand. Vicky himself had been juggling reporters all day, handling them with an enviable calm. In fact, for all the fantastic-ness of his life, Vicky comes across as rehearsed. Every question comes with a precise answer and if you ask for specific anecdotes, he apologises.

Polite and practised. Despite a life story PR machineries would drool over, Vicky does not make for good copy. Unlike his photographs. Which stay with you long after you’ve stepped out in the cool night air, grateful to breathe again. Vicky won a scholarship funded by the Wilhelm and Karl Maybach Foundation and spent six months in New York, photographing the reconstruction on Ground Zero. Black and white images (largely) of men in hard hats, monstrous cranes, mountains of cement. When you ask Vicky about his photos, he is surprisingly candid. Why does he shoot in B&W? “Because it attracts people,” he says. The portrait of the masked worker? “He looks like he is in war, isn’t it?” he says.

Later, as the auto rattles past yet another mall under construction, I see a figure suspended against the inky darkness. Suddenly, Vicky’s masked man floats before my eyes. I’d met this man before, this soldier in our city’s ceaseless quest for construction.

(WTC: Now will show at The American Center, New Delhi, till 19 Feb.)

About The Author

Sohini Chattopadhyay