From studio portraits to selfies, glass plate negatives to generative artificial intelligence, one of Delhi’s oldest surviving photo studios has witnessed a revolution in photography and retained its penchant for freezing memories for more than seven decades.
‘Mahatta & Co.’ says the sign outside the studio on the first floor in M Block of Connaught Place. The studio opened in 1948, even though the family started the business, now in its fourth generation, in Jammu and Kashmir in 1915.
There’s a black-and-white picture in the studio of some Europeans standing in line. “It was taken near our shop in Srinagar in the early 1940s during World War II when we sold only one roll [of film] per person in order to prevent hoarding and black marketing,” 67-year-old Pavan Mehta, grandson of the studio’s founder Amar Nath Mehta, said.
In 1915, Amar Nath opened a first-of-its-kind shop in Srinagar on a houseboat on the Jhelum river. The business expanded rapidly to Gulmarg and Pahalgam in Kashmir, and then to Rawalpindi and Murree, which are now part of Pakistan.
In 1921, the Mehtas became the only sales agents of Kodak, the American photography and photographic film company, in the region. Pavan recalled that one of their outlets in J&K had a board that said “Opticians”. His younger brother Pankaj (62) explained that “a lot of photo studios at the time also dealt in lenses, and thus acted as opticians”.
Before Partition, the Mehtas were also the official photographers to Hari Singh, the last Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir.
After India became independent, the family shut down their studios in Pakistan. In 1948, Amar Nath opened the Mahattas’ studio and store in Connaught Place. The business has remained in the Capital ever since, bearing witness to and chronicling the immense changes that the city has gone through over the last many decades.
Much of the story they captured in their cameras evolved organically; the pictures were never commissioned. “It was a question of being alert and capturing what was exciting to the eye,” Pavan said.
So when he shot a picture of a public phone booth in CP, “I did not know that it was going to vanish one day.” And when Madan Mahatta, Pavan’s father, took a photograph of a flooded CP in 1970 from the window of his shop, he could not have imagined how the shopping district would look more than a half century later.
Pavan has a personal collection of almost 900 cameras. Each has a story, and a story of the way it came to him. Pavan recalled especially his long, determined, and sometimes frustrating wait for a pocket watch-shaped antique “Expo Watch Camera” that had taken him more than two years and two attempts to procure from the United States.
The Mehtas believe that patience, commitment, and the willingness to adapt to technological changes without sacrificing the fundamentals of the business has helped the studio negotiate a century of changes.
“Photography is about being at the right place at the right time,” Pankaj said. “When we started out with taking photos, we had to create a frame in our head before capturing a shot…unlike today.”
