the shadow hunter

Jonathan Torgovnik has little patience for labels. For a photographer born and initiated into photography in Israel,it is tempting to fall back on conflict as inspiration. Torgovnik,as part of his compulsory military service in Israel,did start his career in photography in a similar climate in the Army. However,he brushes aside the nearly 20-year-old experience as something incidental to the course of his career. “It is the aftermath of conflict that interests me more. While I have great respect for war reporting,I am drawn more towards the fall out of war. When the people have left,the news reporters,the TV crew,the works,and the spotlight has found something else to feed on,I like listening to the stories of the people who have survived,” says Torgovnik,in Kolkata for a photography workshop. Stories which might not even figure in the dominant narratives of history.

Torgovnik,whose works have been published in Newsweek,GEO,Sunday Times Magazine among others,have always found ways to look into the shadows. Something that led him to his award winning project Intended Consequences: Rwanda Children Born of Rape. Years after more than 8,00,000 people of the Tutsi tribe were massacred by another called Hutu in a small central African country called Rwanda,the scars have deepened in the form of children born to Tutsi women who were held captive and raped repeatedly by Hutus around that time. The children are all in their early teens now and are often ostracized by their own community for being fathered by the ‘enemy’. “The mothers are not only dealing with the stigma of rape but also struggling to shield the children form the truth of their birth. It took me over two and a half years to convince them to talk to me. I had to send social workers first,then meet them to explain that I mean no harm. When they did open up,I was surprised how they spoke about each gory detail of what they had gone through. The media hardly went back after the genocide,theirs were stories bottled up for over a decade and needed to be told,” says Torgovnik.

The photographer who recently shifted to South Africa after twenty years of living in New York,interviewed and photographed 30 women and children. An estimated 20,000 children were born to the women who are struggling with stigmas,diseases like HIV and poverty after the genocide.

His pursuit of the fringe people also took him to Bollywood. “That was an exhilarating experience. Though I did it years back,even now when I come back to India,I see nothing much has changed. The people working in Bollywood,the light-men,the spot-boys and set people – they have tremendous energy and are incredibly innovative. They can fix things,make substitutes in a jiffy. I used to take their pictures and these secretaries of stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan would be shocked beyond understanding,” he laughs. The result of his Bollywood fixation was a luxurious coffee table book called Bollywood Dreams. All set for a trip to sub-Saharan Africa,Torgovnik has his hands full.