Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1941 Gujarat, British India (now India)

Died: 2015 Vaud, Switzerland

Year of Migration to the UK: 1971

Biography

Photojournalist Ashvin Gatha was born in Gujarat, British India (now India) on 5 December 1941. He spent his early childhood in an orphanage from where, at age 14, he was adopted by his uncle, a nuclear scientist. Gatha moved with him to Singapore at the age of 22, and there he won a newspaper contest with a photograph of animals taken in his uncle’s garden, with a Box Brownie camera which he borrowed from a cousin. He used the prize money to buy a secondhand 120-film camera, eventually graduating to a Mamiya ‘professional’ camera. Despite the objections of his family, Gatha was determined to become a photographer (Poli, 1983). After a period in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, when he was employed as chief photographer at Eve’s Weekly, Gatha moved to New York, USA, working in advertising agencies and fashion houses. He covered the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and the Vietnam War. He also worked for the United Nations and for the international humanitarian agency CARE, for whom he was sent to produce a feature on their school feeding programme in South India (Gemini, 1974). Gaining recognition within photography circles in New York, Gatha was invited to train in colour photography at the Kodak Company in Rochester, NY, and his work soon appeared in their magazines and publicity material. At this time, he met Flora, a dancer from London, England of French-Burmese and Anglo-Indian parentage. They married in 1971, had a daughter Ianthe and moved to London (SADAA).

In London, Ashvin and Flora Gatha created multimedia shows combining dance, mime and photography. In 1981, Flora performed a major ‘one woman’ dance show at the Collegiate Theatre (later renamed the Bloomsbury Theatre) to a backdrop of Ashvin’s photographs. For their Devdasi performance Flora played a temple dancer, first seen in photo-projections by her husband, approaching the Sun Temple at Konarak, Iran, then performing on stage while the pictures formed a backdrop, showing variously enlarged details of her own movements, or of the statues on whose gestures the dance was based (Percival, 1981). Despite their early collaborations, Flora’s career as a dancer and Ashvin’s as a photographer soon led to their separation, and she took the name Flora Devi as her stage name (Flora Devi website).

Gatha began exhibiting widely from the 1980s across Europe, Asia, Australia and the USA. In London, he was featured in significant survey and group exhibitions. In early 1982 he was included in the group show Festival of India: Photography in India 1858-1980 at the Photographers’ Gallery, alongside other well-known figures such as Partha Mitter, Sunil Janah and Mitter Bedi. Later the same year, Gatha was included in Between Two Cultures, a major exhibition curated by Indian Artists UK (a South Asian artists’ collective) and coordinated by artists Ibrahim Wagh and Suresh Vedak. Gatha featured among 17 South Asian British contemporary artists in the show, which was also part of the Festival of India. The exhibition catalogue noted that his works on display ‘reflect not only his wide travels and rare skill in capturing colour’, but also ‘his uncanny ability to create memorable images and patterns. Throughout his career, he has never lost the almost childlike sense of delight in the unexpected or the contradictory. He can often ‘see’ a picture that is invisible to others until he has done the work for them. That, more than anything else, is surely the hallmark of great photography’ (SADAA). In 1986 Gatha was included in Darshan: An Exhibition of Ten Asian Photographers, alongside important artists such as Zarina Bhimji, Sunil Gupta and Mumtaz Karimjee. The exhibition, held at Camerawork in east London, was created under the premise that ‘Asian presence has grown, and so has their contribution, material and cultural, to British society at large’ (Hiro, 1986). in the same year he featured in a documentary film for Channel 4, entitled Colour, directed by Caribbean-born Horace Ové, which also included sculptor, Anish Kapoor and miniature painter, Waheed Pall.

Gatha moved to Vaud, Switzerland in the 1990s. Little is currently known about this latter part of his life, except that he returned to India occasionally, including in 1995 when he presented a workshop at the Mohile Parikh Center in Mumbai (Mohile Parikh Center website). While assembling a 2009 exhibition that included Gatha's work at the Piramal Art Gallery, Mumbai, curator Mukesh Parpiani called him one of the ‘godfathers of Indian photography’ (Choksi, 2009). Ashvin Gatha died in Vaud, Switzerland on 17 March 2015. His work is not currently represented in UK public collections, though Colour is held by the BFI.

Related books

Shobhaa Dé, Selective Memory: Stories from My Life (London: Penguin, 2015)
'Ashvin Gatha', British Journal of Photography, Vol. 131, 1984, p. 1142
Kenneth Poli, 'A Journey Into Color', Popular Photography, Vol. 90, No. 1, January 1983, pp. 76-81
John Percival, 'Dance: Flora Gatha', Times, Thursday 3 September 1981, p. 9
Gemini, 'My Bucket Fills Drop by Drop', Papua New Guinea Post-courier, 13 September 1974, p. 22

Public collections

Related organisations

CARE (photographer)
Indian Artists UK (Exhibiting member)
United Nations (photographer)

Selected exhibitions

Darshan: An Exhibition by Ten Asian Photographers, Camerawork, London (1986)
Between Two Cultures, Barbican Arts Centre, London (1982)
Festival of India: Photography in India 1858-1980, Photographers' Gallery, London (1982)
Flora Gatha: Dance/Mime, with audiovisuals by Ashvin Gatha, Collegiate Theatre, London (1981)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ashvin Gatha]