CHENNAI: At a time when anyone with a camera and a laptop can call themselves a photographer, it was a daunting task indeed to portray film stars in a way that didn’t make them look plastic, says photographer Karthik Srinivasan. He has just released his celebrity calendar for 2012 and his black and white portraits of 25 film stars have attracted rave reviews so far.“I have tried to keep photoshopping to a minimum. There is a certain standard in the industry right now that demands a certain intervention. I have only gone that far. The idea was to show these faces, that we are familiar with, in a way that they haven’t been seen so far. In fact, some of the images in the calendar are completely untouched,” says Karthik.And he does seem to have achieved his goal of novel portrayal. Ace tennis man Vijay Amritraj, who unveiled the calendar, had a hard time identifying even familiar faces on the calendar, according to Karthik. “We are all so used to looking at our stars in a particular way that when they are portrayed differently, it takes a second or two to realise whose picture we are looking at,” says Karthik.The calendar contains 25 portraits of celebrities, all assigned to the months of their birth. The black and white photographs attempt to capture the stars in a very 1940s Hollywood film noir feel. But that is with the artistic heresy of modern photography.“If a critic or old school photographer looks at my calendar, they would probably rubbish it for not sticking to the rules of classic photography. But that’s the nature of the art for today. We have to break and bend the old rules,” says Karthik with a touch of modesty.“These calendars are my way of doing work that I cannot do commercially. Throughout the year, I have to show these same stars in a lot of light. My calendar shows them in little light, with darkness. And that is a way most of us haven’t seen them,” says Karthik.He adds that this aesthetic and personally satisfying effort also posed the biggest challenge. “The stars agreed as soon as I asked them. They came trusting me, that I would make them look good. I had to constantly keep that in mind. I experimented and overstepped boundaries, but my duty to the stars was always on my mind,” says Karthik, smiling.The photographer and his calendar’s popularity was evident from the turnout at its launch on Tuesday evening. Glitterati from Tamil tinseldom flocked to the event, as a show of support for Karthik.
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