A self-taught photographer, Nemai Ghosh is most widely remembered for his collaboration with Satyajit Ray and to whom once Ray referred to as “a sort of Boswell with a camera than a pen.” Starting with Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne in 1968, Ghosh remained Ray’s photographer till the latter’s death in 1992. A three-decade long partnership resulted in an extensive archive of over 90,000 images of the master at work as well as some of the best film stills taken on an analogue camera. His pictures shot exclusively in natural light, highlighted a play with forms and shadows, sticking to black and white photography as that, according to him, accentuated the form better.
Apart from the collaborations with Ray, his work expands over the world of Bengali theatre presented in the book Dramatic Moments (2000) and Indian folk art in Faces of Indian Art (2007). Ghosh’s last piece of work, before his death in 2020, was the photographs he took of the Golden Temple on his analogue camera, attempting to capture
the temple’s resplendent shade of golden in black and white, blending natural light and shade. A staunch believer in the purity of the medium, Ghosh till his later days, continued to produce images from his negatives, as the integrity of the composition remained intact.