New Delhi, Feb 2 (Inditop.com) A continent and the Atlantic Ocean separate the World Trade Centre and the young Vicky Roy from Purulia, an impoverished district in West Bengal, but the geographical distance has not prevented the young photographer – once destitute at the New Delhi Railway station – to chronicle a slice of American history.
Roy has captured the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre in an exhibition of photographs, “WTC: Now”, at the American Center in the capital. The show which opened Jan 28 will continue till Feb 19.
The 25 frames in black and white – barring one – document the progress of the reconstruction work at Ground Zero of the WTC that includes three new towers and a museum. The frames are mostly of scaffolding and construction workers shot at vantage angles with deep interplay of light and shadow – giving them an abstract feel like works of hand-painted art.
The WTC, originally designed by Minoru Yamasaki in the 1960s, was destroyed in a terrorist strike in 2001. Reconstruction work began in 2002.
Roy was commissioned to put together the series by the San Francisco-based Wilhelm and Karl Maybach Foundation as part of their WTC Documentary Arts Project. Roy was one of the four photographers chosen from across the globe for a six-month arts fellowship.
“I fled to Delhi from home in 1999 and found refuge in a non-profit organisation, Salaam Balak Trust, at the New Delhi Railway Station after spending a few months on the streets. I started clicking photographs in 2005. In 2009, I was nominated by the Ramchandernath Foundation for the Maybach programme, who liked my work. I went to New York for six months in March 2009,” Roy told Inditop.
The photographer, who has held exhibitions across the UK and the US, trained in the capital’s Triveni Kala Sangam in 2005.
The photographer visited the WTC reconstruction site three days a week.
“I had to wear special shoes and clothes even to click. The workers and the authorities were strict about safety,” Roy recalled. He used a Cannon 5D Mark 2 camera with a fish-eye lens for the shots.
A panoramic shot – overview – of the WTC complex in lower Manhattan at night with the silhouettes of the buildings illuminated by night lights stands out for its ingenuity of composition. The WTC complex with its thick clusters of commercial built-in spaces and construction sites appears like a saucer floating in space.
“I shot it at 11 p.m. from the 55th floor of my office at the World Trade Centre’s tower 7,” Roy said.
The photograph – a first edition print – is priced at Rs.55,000.
Narrating his experiences in New York city, Roy said: “The one thing that struck out was that living in NYC – foreigners especially non-white and young men like me – are looked at with suspicion. But at the site, it does not matter as there are people of all nationalities and colours working towards a common goal.”
