Soon after Jason Tilley left his staff photographer’s position on a local newspaper he began using my local city centre professional colour lab, in Coventry.
During the accumulating hours that he spent in that lab waiting for his 35mm films to process, watching small colour prints dropping from the conveyor belt from the end of the machine, he watched a short Indian man shuffle in through the door of the lab collect a small package of photographs then shuffled back out again. It was not until 2015 that Jason discovered that the diminutive and unassuming figure was Mr Maganbhai Patel, the photographer known as Masterji.
Masterji left his home and job as a mathematics teacher in Ahmedabad, Gujarat soon after India gained Independence from the British. He arrived in the prosperous English city of Coventry to meet up with friends and many other recent migrants from India in 1958.
To earn enough money for food and board he took a factory job, sharing cheap accommodation with his Indian friends. This was not Masterji’s future – he had come across the world to make his mark. Masterji had been nurturing an interest in photography, bringing with him from India a Box Brownie camera he used as a hobby. Unfulfilled with his mundane day-job, Masterji soon sought the company of creatives and struck up a friendship with local studio photographer John Blakemore, who was at the very beginning his own illustrious photographic career.
Time spent on evening courses at Lanchester Polytechnic and weekend courses with the GEC Photographic Society led to work, including photographing the visit to Coventry of the Indian High Commissioner and then onto portraits of the burgeoning south-Asian community. This led to a 1962 licence to start the Master’s Art Studio on Stoney Stanton Road, Coventry, which still exists today.
2015
Even though Jason Tilley has been printing my own black and white photographs for thirty years he had little experience of printing from other people’s negatives. "It is harder than you think, though no job properly done is ever straightforward. I recently printed my grandfather’s seventy-year-old 35mm panchromatic safety film for exhibition."
A friend, the photographic historian Pete James (@patinotype), advised that grandpa’s old negatives might print a little ‘soft’. His considered assumption turned out to be spot on: whilst handling these rare artefacts, damage was always an ever-present possibility.
A few months ago, Jason began working closely with Masterji’s daughter, Tarla, in Coventry University’s darkroom. They began to sort through her father’s negatives on the lightbox. He was in luck Tarla was a keen analogue printer. Jason and Tarla dusted off her father’s negatives with a soft brush and compressed air, and then tentatively placed the first negative (single cut) into the negative carrier. After the first exposure and development, it was immediately apparent from viewing the first test strips that a thorough cleansing process was necessary. Through his negatives, though debris was not visible to the naked eye, it had accumulated onto the surface of the emulsion. As with the majority of archives, Masterji’s negatives had not been kept in the most suitable of conditions: Tarla admitted that the archive was chaotic!
Using a couple of droplets of photo-flow (fairy liquid original) and a little patience, Tarla and Jason began to first soak then gently wash Masterji’s old film. This is not an easy process when his medium format film had been clipped from its ‘real’ into a singular 6×6 format, making safe handling and drying without damaging the films emulsion a delicate task. For Jason, this was the most nerve-racking process, but he could see from Tarla’s expression it was painful for her to watch too – this was her father’s life work, an Indian immigrant who had refused the menial jobs for migrants to be an artist. Those tough times were captured on this film, and we were the ones responsible for securing this legacy.
They had begun a restoration project and soon had beautiful fresh prints from Masterji’s old negatives. It is this story that inspired the making of the Masterji Short film posted on the Shorts section of this website.
