Abhi Chatterjee

The CTO where I worked was a serious photographer. He made good frames but did not work in Photoshop or Lightroom, and I did. So his pictures started landing on my desk to be retouched. I spent a long stretch of evenings inside other people's photographs, learning where the light was and where it was not.

One day he said the obvious thing.

“If you can see a picture that well, why are you not making them?”

That is where it began. YouTube first, then whatever courses I could find, then a small classroom course in Dum Dum, Kolkata. The technique came quickly. The taste took years.

I never went towards commercial work. What held me was the built picture - a body reduced to shape under 1 light, or a small scene arranged in a room until it reads like a painting. Figure Study and Fine Art are the 2 rooms of that habit.

I was lucky with teachers. Jeet Mukerji took an interest early and gave me far more time and honesty than I had any claim to. Later I had the chance to work alongside Raghu Rai, and that is still the quietest education I have been given - you mostly just watch how someone looks at things.

I stopped making new work after COVID. Design has my full attention again, and design is a creative life too, so the pause has never felt like a loss. This site is where the work finally hangs.