Lens eye view

"So you were pretty much self-taught?” I ask André Fanthome.

"Pretty much?” he responds. “Fully.”

Click here to view André Jeanpierre Fanthome's photo feature

The laid-back, approachable and forthcoming artist becomes animated when discussing his experience seeking aid from an established photographer years ago. Having won several photography contests as an undergraduate, he was considering trying his hand at it as a career.

His mother thought he would starve. Undeterred, he selected some photographs that he even now considers to have value, some of which are part of projects he's still working on. He showed them to the experienced photographer, seeking opinions and advice. He got both.

“He told me, 'Your work's crap'. Then he showed me a French photography book and told me that's how photographs should look.”

For the next five or six years, he didn't show his work to any other photographers. Occasionally, he would show it to painters. When asked how he got his photography education, he answers, “From books.”

“Winning contests is one thing,” he says. “Earning a living from photography is a completely different ballgame.”

According to him, “What photographers do isn't that different from what Dalí was trying to do. Or Miró — it's just a different medium."

Even while proclaiming the need for a similar artistic vision, he did acknowledge the requirements of different skills in each pursuit. “I couldn't draw. I couldn't paint. I wanted to do creative stuff.” Returning to his can’t-do list, he added, “I couldn't write.”

But when his brother, an architecture student, brought home a camera when Fanthome was in his second year of studying economics at university, he had been given his medium. He took some photographs. Then, he won the first contest he entered. Then the second.

He won, he says, every single photography contest in every single category he entered in his final two years in school. (OK, so maybe “several” was an understatement.)

Then came that critique from the professional photographer. However, that didn’t stop him. He’s won several awards since, including the 2008-09 National Akademi Award for Visual Art from the Lalit Kala Akademi.

He's never used his economics degree, he says, although he did work as the business manager of a company that did photography on cruise ships. He also shot photographs for them. The commercial photography he does is all industrial photography and architecture.

“There are no hot models on my website,” he says. There are, however, beautiful orange-yellow sunsets silhouetting horse and rider; rosy-cheeked village kids; and blue-capped, white-walled, sunlit houses sprouting from steep hills. That's at andrefanthome.com.

Born an Indian citizen, Fanthome grew up in Bhutan in a family that had little extra money. Not only were his first photographs taken on a borrowed camera, someone had to buy him film. Perhaps that’s the reason he so strongly advocates making photography accessible to the masses.

Despite his assurance that he couldn’t write, he has become an author through his blog (fanthome.blogspot.com). It’s his way of providing photography students what was so integral to his development as a photographer — written advice on the craft. He goes further, however, and offers what he never got — helpful, constructive criticism of the photographs he invites interested readers to submit.

His self-taught photography education, he feels, resulted in a lot of wasted time, and isn’t an approach aspiring photographers should have to take. Therefore, he mentors three or four students on a full-time basis, having given lectures and workshops at his alma mater, St Stephen’s College in Delhi, and at several other colleges, including School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi.

His current exhibition, 32° Fahrenheit, showcases the magnificence of Alaska, specifically its glaciers. It celebrates the beauty it shows while simultaneously mourning its ongoing march toward extinction and bemoaning the climate-changing contribution humans are making toward it.

He first visited Alaska for two weeks in 2003, while working on the cruise ship. After that, he was eager to return. He finally did, spending four months there in the summer of 2005.

Many of the photos are landscapes with a water foreground. One, called “Eternity,” suggest nothing but, with ethereal clouds camouflaging snowcapped mountains as a backdrop for a bit of sunlit sea that could pass for liquid gold. Others are only water and ice. And, in one — a photo that's all various shades of turquoise — rising bubbles seem to fill the frame; what looks like an underwater photo is a full-frame shot of the above-water portion of a recently capsized iceberg. Fanthome explains that hundreds of years of pressure had pushed the air out of the ice, giving it its colour, and those bubble impersonators are really ice crystals.

In another photo, entitled “Sapphire,” an iceberg of the titular colour floats in the centre, the sun illuminating it and the smaller pieces of ice around it, seemingly from directly overhead. Other than the iceberg's reflection, the water and sky are a uniform black, creating an otherworldly scene. When discussing this photo, Fanthome opportunely notes that he doesn't use Photoshop to digitally alter any of his pictures.

Although he specifically states he’s not an environmental photographer, he is interested in and concerned about the environment, and this shows in his work, and especially in his exhibitions. His first exhibition, entitled “Living Death,” focused on the pollution of the Jamuna River in Delhi.

His two-week-long pursuit of truth and ugliness up and down the Jamuna was undertaken at the request of Vimlendu Jha, from the NGO “Swechha.” In his request for Fanthome’s services, Jha said he had many ugly photos, but he wanted repulsive ones. Fanthome complied.

“It was grotesque,” he says of the exhibition. “People actually puked.”

The exhibition had other purgative effects as well — the organisation soon thereafter accumulated sufficient funds to finance cleaning efforts that made a noticeable difference.

Fanthome hopes to one day teach photography on a regular basis. He’s working on a book and three different exhibitions, all of which will feature parts of India. For now, he’s travelling with 32° Fahrenheit. The American Center helped bring it to Mumbai, but he alone will take it next to Chandigarh, then to Lucknow, and from there, elsewhere, though he isn’t yet sure where that will be.

The driving force for all of this effort remains the same — to be able to take something that other people aren’t able to see, and share it.